


chasing

by MourningPluto



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eridan POV, Humanstuck, M/M, Sex Talk, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-06 13:59:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MourningPluto/pseuds/MourningPluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it shouldn't be so hard. people say it in passing. people sing it in songs.</p><p>but you cannot say "i love you"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 400 Days

**400 Days**

You did something awful.

Kar told you not to, and Kan told you not to, and Fef told you not to, and maybe in the end it was their combined dissuasions that pushed you into the bony arms of Sollux Captor. 

They all had different reasons (excuses, really) and in the grand scheme of things they boiled down to the same reason, not that it matters because you didn't care then and, upon further reflection, you realize that you do not care now. Karkat told you that the object of your fucked up affections/perpetual irritation (because what he really fails to understand is that you'd like him to fuck off just as badly as you'd like him to fuck you) is a moody, reclusive dick incapable of emotions beyond the scope of angry/hungry/tired. You said, "sounds hot." Kanaya told you that people living in close quarters should refrain from dangerous liaisons in order to avoid awkwardness at best, resentment at worst. It's pretty likely that she got this from her psuedo-psych-major girlfriend, or fuck buddy, or whatever the hell it is they are. And hell, you'd love to have some cruel intentions with Captor. It's practically your dream. So you told her "carpe diem". She rolled her eyes at you.

Feferi was something different, because she knows you way better than any of the other scrubs in Boston, MA. Feferi is your other half, the half who can rock a tank-top and not look like a sketchy weirdo, but who cannot pull off belts the way you can. Since childhood you've been convinced that the two of you are split from the same being. She is the good cop to your bad cop. She is the bitch when you don't have the energy to pull it off. You grew up with her, and when you both moved from Florida to Massachusetts upon getting accepted to Harvard (like the rich little overachievers you both are) you both ran into this strange, all-encompassing group of people who somehow all know each other and have a slurry of inside jokes and idiosyncrasies that the two of you remain loftily above when you're able to. 

So yeah, you listen to Feferi, and you definitely read her frantic text message just as carefully as you'd listened to Karkat's phone call, just as conscientiously as you'd read Kanaya's email. 

And you are sorry. You are. 

But holy shit, did you laugh. You were in the damn library; that's not exactly kosher. It's hardly your fault. You'd been doing homework, leaning back in the ever-comfortable, harder than morning wood chair, and then you'd felt your phone go off. So you'd pulled it out of your pocket and read it. 

And you'd laughed so damn hard that you'd fallen back onto the technicolor vomit carpeting. 

She'd been pretty ballsy, implying what she had. As if she hadn't gotten strongarmed by the others. Basically, she'd called you out for going after one of her bisexual/bicurious/bilateral/bifurcated exes, of which she has probably a thousand, because Fef has a thing for bi guys, you don't know why, she just does. And in the message - it was the damndest thing, but she'd acted like you haven't dated at least eleven of those aforementioned exes. Or set her up with at least twelve of yours. The two of you share everything. You share toothbrushes, you share eyeliner, and you share boyfriends. 

The idea of her getting suddenly indignant about this one specific case was pretty silly. 

Underneath the abundance of affirmations that you should under no circumstances pursue your awful asshole hotter than a curling iron roommate was one indisputable fact of which your friends were convinced: Sollux does not find you attractive. 

(*didn't) 

That's exactly how you wrote it. One beautiful, autumn afternoon you'd been walking down Culver St., on your way home from your dystopian lit class, and Karkat had texted you that. Just that. "Sollux does not want you." Or something to that effect. 

So you sent back a minor correction. 

(*didn't )

Took the poor fuck six minutes on the dot to get it. 

Probably the best part of the fact that you finally got it on with him, besides the fact that you've been wanting to for a good three months, is that you were both sober. You remember everything like the best of Kodak moments (probably gonna give you spank-bank material for weeks, as much as you hate to admit it) and you know he does, too. It also means it's real; he can't claim ignorance or inebriation. He wanted you.

(*wants)

Second best part: it started with a fight, and you hadn't even planned it. 

The thing is, you two fight all the time. It's almost a running joke. In private, in public. Doesn't matter. It's gotten to a point where when anyone at all gets in a fight, someone else has to ask "who was the Eridan," which apparently means, "who screamed the loudest". 

Your friends are assholes, especially when they're right. 

So you'd come home with orange chicken, and then left to shower, and lo and FUCKING behold, the sneaky skinny bastard had inhaled every fucking piece while you were practicing decent hygiene. Whenever you two fight, you always raise your voice while he whisper-shouts at you, but this time, you were both raising your voices pretty loudly. You remember the floors shaking. That's the thing; you may be pretty fucking enamored with your roommate, but GOD ALMIGHTY does he piss you off proper. You may think he has a cute smile, but sometimes he pisses you off so bad that you want to punch it in. Such is life. 

He had triumphantly announced that there was no way in hell that you were gonna get your orange chicken back, and you'd said that you could kill him, which you could, you're sure of it. 

This is where it gets blurry. Right here. 

Who initiated it, you do not know. You think it's pretty likely that you kissed him in a desperate attempt to shut him up or, hell, even to get back the taste of your goddamn orange chicken. You also think it's possible that he decided 'kiss' and 'kill' are sort of the same thing. But either way, you ended up attached at the mouth, parting only to say shit like

"I'll take off my clothes."  
"I just bet you will."  
"I'll take off yours."  
"I dare you, you cocksucker."  
"I'll do that, too."

Which, for the record, you did. It brought him to honest-to-God tears. He pulled your hair a lot. Big fan of talking dirty. Maybe someday you'll learn to be insulted by nasty things like "trashy, overdramatic attention whore", but it just turned you on under those specific circumstances, and honestly, it wasn't like you were in a prime position to be arguing back. As it stands you are something of an emotional masochist, which is probably what drew you to him in the first place. 

Here and now, you’re all crashing at Karkat’s place, while his partner in abolishing crime stands snickering from the kitchen, sipping at her Big Red, looking at you over the rims of her “is my vision shit or am I just a douche” indoor shades. You tell her to take a picture ‘cause it’ll last longer. 

“Not if you paid me to take it!” she says, interrupting her abrasive, obnoxious laughter to get in a jab at you. Such is Terezi. 

“Back to the matter at hand,” says Kanaya, ever the mediator, “I believe we were previously discussing Eridan’s foolish attempts to woo the unwooable?” Feferi giggles at ‘unwooable’. You knew she would. 

“The matter at hand?” Karkat asks. “No, how about this - how about the fact that this asshole - “ - he gestures to you in case there’s a shred of doubt as to who ‘this asshole’ could be - “- emotionally blackmailed my best friend into sleeping with him? That is not okay, dude. That’s fucking low.” 

And at this point you’ve basically had enough, thanks ever so much.

“Look,” you say, holding out your hands palms-out. “I didn’t emotionally blackmail him. I didn’t do shit. Takes two to tango, and he wanted to fucking dance. What the hell do you want me to say?” You feel pretty confident that Karkat is not really accusing you of sexual assault. He’s just being overemotional, like usual. And a little dramatic. Honestly, that guy is so dramatic. Kind of a douche, too. 

“It was a mutual thing,” you ascertain. “He can’t even lie about it. He can’t.”

“And that is where you’re wrong,” declares Karkat. “You are underestimating the depths of Sollux’s shame and sef-loathing. You have only scratched the tip of the outer layer of ice of the top of the tip of THAT iceberg, man.” He leans forward in his chair. Smacks his knees with his hands.

Oh boy.

“No, it’s not even an iceberg. It’s so much worse than that. It’s like - you know what? It’s like a pie. And you see the crust and go, okay, it’s a fucking pie, big deal. Let’s say the crust represents the way he’s a fucking douchebag. Which let’s face it, he is.”

“But then you slice the pie and the filling represents how he actually hates himself more than everyone else, right? Yeah, save your breath, Kar.” 

“Not at all! Listen up, fuckface, and don’t fucking interrupt. I’m doing you a favor. So you have the inner layer, which does just so happen to represent his inner turmoil, of which there is a goddamn universe full of, rotting in that head of his. But what happens when you cut a pie? Hm? You want to interrupt, now?” 

You don’t interrupt.

“You get more of the crust. More of the same “I hate everyone” bullshit. It’s the same thing. I promise you.” He shakes his head. “For fuck’s sake, Eridan, don’t you remember when he dated Feferi? No one knew about that for weeks, and he was pretty crazy about her.” Feferi looks away. “Hell, even Ar-” 

The room goes quiet, and you and Feferi share a look. Because if two of you have learned anything about this group of scattered, vaguely broken people you’ve both grown to fit in with, it’s that you do not ask questions about the mysterious girl known as Aradia. 

As far as you know, anything could have happened. Neither of you are really sure. Every time her name is mentioned people go quiet and look around awkwardly and it’s even worse if she’s brought up in conjunction with Sollux. If he’s in the room, he gets up and leaves. Just like that. Comes back with a beer and acts like everything’s fine, but still, people don’t just up and leave when things are fine, they just don’t. But yeah, you and Feferi don’t have a clue. Every time you ask you’re given nasty looks, and Feferi doesn’t have the nerve. All the same the two of you do get a sick pleasure (or at least entertainment) out of bouncing ideas off each other. Did she dump Sollux in a tragic awful way? Did she go to prison? Is she Mafia? Is she lamia? 

You and Feferi really do have a good time speculating. It’s a lot of fun, especially since you both sort of suffer from overactive imaginations. You don’t have the heart to tell her that you suspect she might have died. (People don’t look that somber and quiet over snake monster ladies or even Italians, for that matter.) Although it is how you’d like to go (smart, young, handsome, rich) it still sucks for everyone else, you imagine. 

If you ever do tell her, you suspect you’ll both guess how she kicked the bucket, but that will just have to wait. 

“He wasn’t ashamed of Aradia,” Karkat says, and you know, you don’t even have the nerve to ask the obvious, unspoken question. 

It’s not as if you don’t already know that he regrets it, really.

“Maybe I just wanted to see somethin’ that wasn’t there,” you say, and with this you decide to excuse yourself. “I’m out. Later.” 

“I just don’t want him getting hurt,” Karkat says, and since it’s not peppered with long, winding, profanity-filled metaphors, you realize that he might be genuine. 

Well, shit. 

“Maybe I’m capable’a bein’ hurt, too. Did you ever think of that?” 

You leave unceremoniously and you ignore Kanaya’s rapid-fire urging, Feferi’s rushed rationalizing, and Karkat’s silence. 

You hear Terezi laughing her ass off from inside but you can’t be bothered to care. 

+++ 

So what choice do you have? You go home. “Home” isn’t the dorms (what a fucking joke) - it’s an apartment, which you mostly pay for because Sollux, bless the place where his heart should be, is a scholarship kid. Of course, you’re also a scholarship kid, but your father also donated an obscene amount of money to the public park located near Harvard University. He was polite enough to not name it after himself, saving you social starvation or even outright rejection. Good bragging rights, but it’s damn unlikely anyone would stand to be around you if you had a little piece of Boston called “Ampora Square”, or some other such pretentious bullshit. 

Home is in a relatively nice part of town. The thing is that you’ve known Karkat for way longer than you’ve known anyone else, save of course for Feferi. You met him on a World of Warcraft raid and ended up talking to him on Skype. You’ve known him since almost-forever, and when you moved here, he bribed Sollux into being your roommate because supposedly he thought you’d get along. 

Oh, how you loathed each other.

Except you don’t really loathe him that bad anymore. 

You get home and he’s on his headset so you get the hell out of the living room. Fuck that noise. Fuck that noise with a cleaver. You instead retreat to your bedroom, where you spend the next half hour attempting a variety of artistic pursuits. Painting, photography, screenplay writing, flipping idly through cookbooks. You’re not really good at any of them. You’re adequate at all of them, but you aren’t really good. You’re the best at cooking, because you’re Italian and you had a Nonna to make sure you could grow up and cook. But your paintings remain average and gloomy, your photography is still unfocused and commonplace, and your screenplay writing is schmaltzy crap. 

As it so happens, you’re writing a monologue for the dastardly Marchioness (a character in a play you’re working on that’s entitled “drowning”, all lowercase, even though nobody drowns, because everyone knows it’s cool to title your stories vague words in all lowercase) when you hear your door open. 

You pull out an earbud and arch your eyebrow reproachfully. 

“What are you doing here?” You pause and decide to quote Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s a bad habit of yours. You watch something, anything, and it becomes yours. “Five words or less.”

Sollux ponders this, and his eyes light up. He really does love a challenge. He holds up two fingers like a peace sign.

“Wanna fuck?”

You’re too impressed to say no.

(One night stand? You don't fucking think so.)


	2. 322 Days

**322 Days**   


You’ve never been fond of winter.

Of course, you’re not overly fond of any seasons that are...well, actual seasons. You are used to wearing short sleeves in December; you are used to 80-degree Hanukkahs and 75-degree Christmasses. (Your family always celebrated both, even after your mom left. You became honorary Catholics, which is basically how you ended up honoring Lent as well as Yom Kippur. Although you don’t honor either anymore.) 

What you are not used to is snow; big, fluffy handfuls falling from the sky relentlessly. You feel like you’re living in a Christmas cartoon, the claymation kind that invent backstories for elves who want to be dentists. You are flabbergasted that snow is an actual thing. How can anyone function when the world looks like a snowglobe? 

Every day you are struck with the urge to run around outside and roll around in it - get it in your hair and on your face and make dumb snowmen with dumb faces. But everyone else is so nonplussed by the weather that you flat-out refuse to. Furthermore, you are also sort of terrified that you’ll - you have no idea how, mind you - get hypothermia and die. Yes, you’re quite sure that’s a thing that happens. Probably all the time. Probably all kinds of sad fuckers run around like assholes in inclement weather and end up dead. And while you’ve dreamt of your own death, you sure as fuck almighty do not want to die by something like that. (You can see your funeral. “Eridan Ampora: friend, neighbor, and holy shit what kind of dipshit dies by exposure?”) That’s also part of it. You’re from Florida. Your warmest clothes are considered summerwear.

Basically it all boils down to this: when you die, you don’t want to feel a thing.

So, yeah, you don’t do a whole lot of that winter wonderland frolicking around bullshit. You stay inside, curled up with a mug of mocha-caramel coffee and covered in blankets and bitching, ceaselessly, about why the hell it’s so fuckin’ cold.

Sollux laughs at you constantly. 

Oh, but he’s always laughing. 

That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. There are times where he’s not laughing, because there’s times where you’re fucking, and never the two shall meet. You make damn sure of that. But there’s not really a lot of time devoted to anything else. Sometimes he locks himself in his room to go on headset and scream at twelve-year olds on X-Box live, and sometimes you work on your screenplay or paintings or photography. But although your muse should hypothetically be up in arms, with the beautiful frost-covered scenery to look upon, it’s pretty much gone the way of the plants and died. As it stands you aren’t sure if you’ll get it back come springtime or not. 

Anyway, you don’t talk about it. The sex. You don’t really have a name with it; most people call it “fuck buddies”. There’s probably other terms for it, too. Back home you just called it a booty call, but there comes a point where it’s hardly shocking or scandalous to have the guy who sleeps literally two rooms away from you come into your bed uninvited and start making advances, which he does, and sometimes so do you. Your favorite is “friends with benefits” - except, you know, not! Like, at all! The way you two use each other makes you physically ill, because you do have feelings for him and the sex (mind blowing and crazy good as it is) exacerbates them. You thought it might make things better, and in a way it does, but to keep doing this is basically going to send you to the loony bin. 

You see, it’s slowly killing you. Maybe even worse than freezing to death.

Friends with benefits is such a fucking joke, anyway. You aren’t friends. You know better. And if you WERE friends and you DID like each other enough to have aforementioned ‘benefits’, then why wouldn’t you just be a thing? Why the hell wouldn’t you be dating under that oddly specific criteria? 

The answer is that you aren’t friends. You might even be enemies; you’re not exactly sure. It would probably help if all your sexual encounters didn’t start with an argument of some kind. (Okay, not all of them, but holy shit do a lot of them.) Sometimes you feel yourself falling into that rut, falling into another argument, and it’s not exactly like you give a shit about whether or not he uses coasters on your shitty IKEA furniture, nor do you think he gives a good god damn if you leave your ceramic coffee mugs everywhere. You do have other things you care about, though, such as your classes and your job (your dad doesn’t pay for everything after all) and all of it builds up, to the point where suddenly the energy drink on the KLUBBO coffee table brings you to a shuddering, screaming rage, because he always fucking does it, and doesn’t he ever listen to the things you tell him? Doesn’t he ever pull his head out of his ass for the two seconds it would take to comprehend what you’re telling him? 

And that’s usually when he tells you that you wouldn’t really know about that, your big, swollen head wouldn’t fit up that tight ass of yours, the one so tight that you could shove coal up there and get a diamond necklace in a week. (It’s not just the insult. You know he didn’t make it up. He got it from TV, you know he didn’t make it up. It’s just the way he says it. He emphasizes “tight” because he knows you don’t like the word and he tends to imply after a moment’s thought that you’d derive pleasure from the scenario involving the coal, and that basically pisses you off proper.) 

So after about an hour of this you end up making out, because you know, after a point you just decide you’d rather not hear him talk, and he basically decides the same thing. By that point, you don’t have a choice. Your choice is floor, counter, or table. 

And it’s always fantastic. 

And you always feel like shit after.

Because you did it, you fell for it again, you stupid son of a bitch. 

Maybe sometime the two of you will fuck and he won’t kick you out of his bed or leave yours like it’s crawling in cockroaches, but you just sort of doubt it. The irritating thing is that you’re no coward, and you’re definitely not shy. You wear your emotions on your sleeve. You are Eridan, and you are not afraid of anyone. 

But the thing about wearing your heart on the outside is that anyone can see it. Anyone can see it, and anyone can poke at it, and anyone can do whatever the flying fuck they want. When you cry about it later, people tell you that it’s your fault. Because you kinda had it coming anyway, right? You really did deserve it for leaving yourself out in the open.

And what kind of dipshit dies by exposure? 

You’ve been doing a lot less of that lately. Less, “let’s talk about our relationship,” and a little bit more, “if you’re going to want to bang at least let me do the crossword while you’re going at it”. (Full disclosure: since about week one of your glorious coming out, you’ve thought yourself far too good for anal of any variation. Now you do it whenever he asks. It’s not so much that you’re his compliant willing bitch so much as it is that you’ve gotten off from it at least once and you keep hoping the next time will be like the first. It’s kind of weird.) 

It’s not like you totally hate it or you wouldn’t fucking do it. Any of it. If you really didn’t like it you just wouldn’t sleep with him. Therein lies the problem: you like sex and you like him and you like having sex with him and it’s a big, terrible mess. 

Friends with benefits is a fucking fraud. 

It is one such cold winter day when you find yourself re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, because Dystopian Lit has rekindled your passion for Orwell and Huxley and all of them. You have a special fondness for Nineteen Eighty-Four and you aren’t sure why. Something about a boot stomping on a human face forever draws you like a moth to a flame. You’re still freezing and no matter how many blankets you curl up in - one after the other like a Russian nesting doll - you still can’t warm up. And it only surprises you the tiniest bit when Sollux emerges from his room to retrieve another energy drink from the fridge.

“You’re gonna die,” you say evenly, and he looks at you like you just asked him to fuck you with a garden hoe. 

“What?” he asks. You look up at him from your much more interesting book, mildly confused. 

“Well, you are.” You say it like fact. “Those energy drinks. They’ll give you cancer or probably a heart attack. Maybe both. You’re gonna die because you drink ‘em so much. Enjoy.” 

You don’t really have a reason for being so catty, except for the obvious.

You know, because you love him and stuff. 

“I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna fall victim to - “ and here he goes, with the obnoxious finger-quotes gesture he’s so fond of - “‘death by energy drink’, thank you very much.” He looks at you and you think it might be the same face he makes when people at work ask him why their computers won’t work after downloading Smiley Central. “The fuck do you care, anyway? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not your business whether or not I’m - “ oh, look, there he goes again, - “‘gonna die’, you uneducated hick.” 

Well, that stings. 

“Uneducated my ass,” you bark back. “I went to private school and graduated second in my class. Talk to me about bein’ uneducated when your diploma stops saying “ass-backwards shithole public school number three-oh-two”, then we’ll fuckin’ talk.” 

You really do hate getting into fights with him, but honestly, how can you not?

“Would you listen to yourself? You can’t even speak correctly.”

“Well, you’re hardly one to be lecturing me about that, of all things.”

(He makes it so easy, how can you not?) 

“Look,” he says, spitting out the words, “one fucking energy drink isn’t going to kill me and it’s not your business if it does. Okay? Now would you kindly fuck off?” You roll his eyes at you. Fucker’d probably fancy himself the Atlas to your Jack Ryan if he’d ever played the game. 

“Don’t would-you-kindly me,” you admonish him. Nope, doesn’t look like he knows what the hell you’re going on about. All of his games are lame. Snore. In fact, you’re pretty sure you’ve heard him bash all of your favorite video games for being “interactive movies”. He’s such a snob it’s actually insufferable. You’ve never meant the word more than you have with him. 

“Whatever. Did you have a point in engaging me in conversation, or can I go fuck off, since you won’t?” 

He doesn’t wait for you to answer and runs off to his room in a fit of exasperation. 

This is how all of your conversations with him end. 

Well, all the real ones. 

You find yourself unable to immerse yourself in the world of the Party and Newspeak now that Sollux has gone and pulled this fucking stunt. He’s such a baby, and his behavior is rude, not to mention controlling.

You’ve fallen for him damn hard. It’s sort of become a problem. Maybe you should just call home and come out to your family and get it over with. 

(No, that’s a terrible idea. You resolved not to tell your dad and brother about your wanton preference for cock until there was a reason to; namely, until you had a boyfriend. But as boyfriends came and went you decided that you wouldn’t come out to the folks back in Florida until you fucking felt ready. You were going to do it last year at Thanksgiving, but it slipped your mind.) 

And in your desolation, you do what you always do. You call Feferi. 

Listening to her ringback tone (oh, was there “something in the air that night”? whatever, ABBA isn’t even good) fills you with a peculiar sort of dread that you can’t quite justify to yourself. You discard your blanket and immediately regret it. It’s like trying to call someone from the inside of a meat locker. Shivering and muttering obscenities under your breath, you make your way to your room, where you accost the piles and piles of fuzzy blankets on your bed while you hold your iPhone to your ear by propping it up with your shoulder. You locate the best blanket (shit’s so soft, it could advocate boner pills) and wrap it around yourself to the best of your ability as you wait for her to pick up. Which she does, on the very last ring. 

“Eridan?” she asks, like she doesn’t know it’s you. Her phone has custom ringtones for everyone. All Queen songs. Yours is “Don’t Stop Me Now”. “What is it?” 

“I’m havin’ an emotional crisis. Are you busy?” 

You practically hear her roll her eyes at you, but she doesn’t hang up. That’s a good sign. 

“Lucky for you, I just finished my last final.” You arch your eyebrows up high at her. Wait. She can’t hear that. 

“Are you home? Can I come over?” When you’re met with silence, you insist that it’s important. 

“Fine,” she says. “But if this is about your booty-call gone bad, I reserve the right to kick you out on your ass.” 

You agree to her terms and you hang up,on the grounds that after fucking six times, you sure aren’t anyone’s booty call.

+++

“Do you even know what a booty call is?” 

She accuses you from the other side of the living room. You’re sitting in the chair that she got from her grandma, the light-pink one that smells of perfume and vaguely like the sea. She’s pacing, as she does when she’s worked up, and nursing a cup of Constant Comment. 

“Uh... I guess not?” 

She looks at you reproachfully. Or at least as reproachfully as Feferi is capable. 

“A booty call is someone you call over to do it with in the middle of the night because you don’t care enough about them to ask them out!” You think she’s done, but the look she gives you tells you otherwise. “I mean, you slept with him once. So big deal. He probably doesn’t-”

“Six,” you say, real quiet under your breath. 

Feferi really isn’t an angry person, but when she does get to that point, she’s truly a sight to behold. Her eyes go wide, and her tone spikes, and quite frankly it’s scared you ever since you were little. 

“What?” she asks you. (You can practically hear it typed out in all caps. “WHAT?” more than “What?” This is no innocent inquiry.) 

“Six,” you reply as casually as you can. “It wasn’t just once. We’ve done it six times.” 

What follows is not the most awkward silence you’ve ever had to endure, but it comes pretty damn close. 

“So this isn’t just a one-time thing, is it?” she asks you, really carefully and soft. You shake your head no. It makes you wish you had some Constant Comment to quell having to listen to Feferi’s constant comments about your sex life. 

“Why am I just finding about this now? Aren’t we supposed to best friends? We tell each other everything! And I’m pretty sure having a friends-with-benefits thing with your roommate qualifies as “everything”!” 

Maybe so. You aren’t really sure anymore.

“Well, I’m sorry,” you say, throwing your hands up in exasperation, and you really are sorry is the worst part about it. Feferi is capable of inducing guilt in you that, without her presence, you are fairly sure would be inaccessible to the most meticulous of martyrs. “I didn’t want to say anythin’ because what the hell is there to say? You’re completely right, you know. I’m a booty call.” You spit the words out like they’re the most vile kind of poison. 

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” she says, sitting down on the couch adjacent from your old-lady chair of choice, which you haven’t gotten up from. “You like this boy?” 

Fittingly, you don’t say anything. Her face softens. 

“Of course you do. You want to get over him?” 

The answer to this is more complicated, but essentially yes, oh fuck yes do you want to get over him. To not look at him and think dumb trash sappy thoughts about how he’s handsome even when it’s six am and you’re both getting ready for school and objectively he looks like total shit; to not think about him constantly as you go about your day, wondering what he’d say or do in response to your typical mundane stimuli; to not torture yourself with the notion that he is so not into you, could really live without you; to not ask him “look at me” when you fuck because you’re terrified he’s thinking of someone else. 

Yeah, you’d love to get over the sorry son of a bitch. 

You nod.

“So here’s what you do.” She speaks like she knows everything, like she’s had this shit planned. Considering how almost all of her relationships have ended on freakishly good terms, you decide that she just might. “You ask him on a date. A real, day-walker, public-affair date.” 

You honest-to-God blanch at the very idea. 

“Are you crazy? He’ll say no! Of course he will! You know that!” You’re thinking about getting up and leaving. Feferi is one of the few people who has some level of tolerance for your capricious, flighty bullshit, so naturally you take this for granted at every opportunity. 

“He might," she says vaguely. It almost makes you laugh. "But he might not! And more importantly, this is about you getting over him. What better to help get over him than being horribly rejected?"

You see the logic in Feferi's statement, and she makes a good point. Every unattainable, hopeless, crazy stupid crush you've had has been crushed by rejection. Maybe that's it; maybe that's what she's trying to recreate. It'd be annoying if it weren't so true. 

"What makes you think it's so easy? Like I can just do that? Just walk up to him an' go, "Hey, Sol! Lovely day we're havin', ain't it, with this shit freezin' cold weather of ours? What do you say instead of fuckin' we go out to the Olive Garden?" 

She gives you that look that tells you you're being too dramatic again. 

"It's just not that easy, is all. It'll probably take tons of awkward build-up, hours of small talk, that kinda thing. And God forbid I try to ask him in the middle of one of his coding things, or Animal Planet, or some shit." You're sure you see her roll her eyes, but you continue. "Plus, if I do get rejected, I don't even know if I could handle that. That just might be what it takes to push me over the edge. Do you really think I can cope if and when Sol heartlessly turns me down?" 

She takes your hand in hers and looks at you earnestly, both of you completely knowledgeable about the fact that you're fucking with each other. Still, you needed this. And you might even be dumb enough to take her advice.

"I think you'll be okay," she says, and like everything that comes out of her mouth, you find yourself believing it. 

But on the way home you wonder - as you shiver to death amongst the practically nuclear winter - if your faceitious bitching might have some truth to it. What if you do have to stall for a ridiculously long time just to lead up to the question? (You've decided on Olive Garden even though you're Italian and could totally cook better at home. You've decided on Olive Garden because it's cheap and your dad's check for the month hasn't come in yet.) Worse still, what if you actually freeze up? What if he says no and - God forbid - what if you care? 

These are the thoughts that trouble you as you make your way across Newberry Street and journey back to the place you, perhaps foolishly, call home. 

+++

"Hey Sol."

"What? Care to accost me about my energy drinks again? Save it." 

"Want to go out sometime? Olive Garden? I'll pay." 

The five seconds which pass are the longest five seconds you've ever felt; not the longest you ever will feel, but the longest you have as of yet, you're convinced. 

And then the fucker smiles.

"Sure. Just don't expect me to dress nice for you, Ampora." 

You should probably be more upset about being referred to so impersonally, but you can't. You're too busy being happy; so happy, you could die. In fact, you even decide to reward yourself with another cup of hot chocolate, this time spiked with some season's-fucking-greetings. You've earned it.

“Saturday, 6:00,” you tell him, and he waves his hand dismissively in a way that lets you know he heard.


	3. 309 Days

**308 Days**

You’re staring at him breathless and battered and totally spent. You wish you could take a picture. Take a picture and carry it around with you. Just to have. He really does look endearing like this, and as far as you’re concerned you’ve got the best damn view in the house. He’s such a sight. Face all red and hair all fucked. 

You think he might be asleep. You’re not sure. 

+++

309 Days 

There is some kind of affliction which exists - some kind of dementia, no doubt - that causes its victims to erroneously think that inviting all of their respective friends into their homes to eat everything and judge everything is a good idea.

You have this affliction.

Bitten by the party bug, you’ve decided to throw a New Year’s Eve bash, and your boyfriend is having none of it. Yeah, your boyfriend. He’s the same boyfriend whose laundry you do (“Get out of my way, I need this machine. I ain’t just washin’ my clothes, I got my boyfriend’s shit in here, too.”) and the same boyfriend you buy condoms for (“Yeah, well, you know I wouldn’t buy anythin’ other than the “extra large” kind, but these are for my boyfriend, and you know how it is.”) and the same boyfriend you never shut the fuck up about.

You’re sort of really fucking happy that he’s your boyfriend.

The first date - way back in early December, where you took him out to get second-rate pasta - was a relative success. You knew better than to make it official after one date, or to even try. (The two of you did flout the “only fuck on the third date” rule, or whatever the hell the rule is. Not like either of you are fantastic virgins or anything; no great loss.) You were pretty happy. He was pretty happy. Ten out of ten, would recommend. 

Then there was the second date. Yeah, that was sort of a thing. 

Your second date was completely forced and completely overplanned, the way you do just about everything. It was meant to be a celebration, you guess; your birthday isn’t until February and you’re pretty sure his is in June, but fuck it, finals are over and you think you skipped Christmas and you know you skipped Hanukkah, you deserve a fucking celebration, you deserve a goddamn break with the guy you’re sort of nuts for. So you decided to go down by Kinume Square, look at the freezing barren trees and maybe even take pictures. Which you did. (It was snowy and icy and although you hated it, the pictures turned out fantastic. About the only good thing that came from the date. Both of you look rosy-cheeked and overjoyed to be alive, which let’s face it, neither of you are.) 

And then you took him to Mme. Volange’s, a French restaurant that is really meant for classy people, the kinds of people your dad threw parties for when you were little, not two college-age kids who possibly look like they could be homeless. You charged everything to your Gold Card, little plastic piece of magic that it is, and both of you said nothing as you realized that neither of you can stand French food for the life of you. The most stone-cold silent meal you ever had. 

You thought about asking him out but you got distracted and also okay you kind of chickened out. 

A few days ago you went on what could technically be called your third date - which mainly consisted of the two of you eating pizza on the couch and watching Netflix together. You took turns picking out movies. (You: Everything Is Illuminated. Him: Tron. You: Serenity. Him: one of the Indiana Jones movies.) And you were in the middle of making out on the couch when you asked him, real sudden-like, if you could possibly be considered a thing. He smirked at you. Raised his eyebrows and told you to make it Facebook official for all he cared. 

Which you did.

It got exactly eleven likes. 

(You constantly thank God almighty for giving you the foresight and general wisdom to refrain from accepting your brother’s friend request on Facebook. In fact, as far as you know he still thinks you deleted your account.) 

Despite the exactly eleven likes, your friends accepted the news with varying amounts of enthusiasm - and in fact, some people who you barely even know came up to you out of the blue, whether in person or on the internet, to congratulate you or condescend you or some terrifying combination of the two. In the days following your official relationship with Sollux Captor, his secret fan following came creeping out of the woodwork, as did everyone in the tri-state area who ever had a bone to pick with him. Perhaps worse is that with every increasingly elaborate description you gave of these people, Sollux had an decreasingly detailed reply. When you gave him “tall weird steroids guy”, he gave you a relatively amusing anecdote about a guy he used to go to high school with. When you spun a well-woven tale about this kawaii-desu weeb chick with honest to God cat ears on, he retorted with “Nepeta. Badass. Vietnamese, you racist fuck.” You’ve since come to the conclusion that Sollux knows everyone, just everyone there is to know in this sick sad world.

As for your actual friends, they were hesitant to believe it at all; Kanaya offered mild congratulations when you saw her at Econ, and Feferi just about lost it when you texted her the details at 3:00 am, earlier that same day. And that would have been fine, but then there’s Karkat, there’s always Karkat. 

After hearing fuckall from him for the forty eight hours you'd been dating, you and Sollux ran into Karkat on the way home from your last classes of the day (his being at 6, yours being at 3:30; you’d killed time at The Cove, a coffee shop you’re fond of). And he arched his eyebrows real high and asked you, low and quiet on the crowded streets, what the flying everloving fuck was wrong with you both. 

You asked him if he wanted that alphabetically or by importance of the law, and he told you to shut any and all of your gaping orifices. Which is pretty rude, but you’ve grown to tune out most of Karkat’s ruder obscenities. It’s kinda like white noise.

But that’s the thing about Karkat. In his moments of lucidity, he is actually capable of causing you harm, and that might be what makes it hurt the most. You should see it coming, but you don’t. You dismiss his bravado and it bites you in the ass every time, without fail.

“What about Aradia?” he’d asked, and it’s funny in retrospect - not funny ha-ha, but funny as in odd, because why would he bring that up? Why would he bring up ghostgirl when if you so much as say the first syllable you get the glare with the intensity of a million Gizmos from Gremlins? 

You didn’t think of it at the time. Just something you think about now and then when you replay the scene. 

It was so loud, on that busy street. The three of you made way for a gaggle of businessmen, all practically indistinguishable, and you ducked under an awning for a building that’s no longer occupied. They yelled in soft tones. You said nothing. 

“It’s been six years,” he’d said. “Come on, Eridan. Let’s go.”

And you did.

Six years what, you’re tempted to ask, but at the same time you know better. It does reaffirm your theory that she’s dead; at the same time it doesn’t, because there’s no way Karkat would be pissed about Sollux dating you just because of his six-years-dead girlfriend. If they were even dating. Who the hell knows? Not you.

(You’re pretty sure they were dating. Something about the way Karkat asked.) 

Since then, he’s apologized to both of you. And since then, you’d say everything’s worked out. 

Boyfriends.

Sometimes when you’re alone you say the word to yourself and smile really big because you’re a giant dork. 

The funny thing is that while you do invite him to sleep in your bed and you do kiss him a lot and you do allow him to lavish you with semi-sarcastic petnames, not much else has changed. You still fight a lot, not awful but a lot. It helps you blow off steam, and you always get over it. (Like, okay, you do fuck a lot to get rid of stress, but if you did that all the time neither of you would walk ever again.) 

So okay, you fight a lot. Usually one of you storms off - you to Fef, him to Kar - or occasionally one of you will say something so left-field that the fight just dissipates. (One time, you got so pissed that you called him a “cock sheath”. He looked at you like you were crazy. “Did you just call me a condom?” he asked you, and you said maybe, and then you both laughed so hard that your stomachs ached.) 

But none of that matters. Yeah, you fight but - here’s the brilliant part - you always come back to each other. LaLonde (that’s the name of Kanaya’s girlfriend-not-fuck-buddy) insists that this is proof you’re a masochist. You mock her incessantly. (“Yeah, right! Can you, like, just picture me, like, layin’ on the bed?” You go falsetto. “Hurt me! Hurt me! Oh, yes!” You smack your ass a few times and croon for her to really get the point across. You’re a fan of LaLonde; so much so, in fact, that you never ever call her Rose.)

You think things are pretty okay, overall.

Except for this party, which will probably kill you.

“Your fault,” Sollux says to you from the couch, as you scrub the floors with a fervor you haven’t even seen since your torrid affair with amphetamines a year or two ago. “Your fault for being stupid and inviting people over.” 

“Bite me,” you tell him. There’s a stain on one of the tiles that you’re almost positive is older than God; certainly not your fault. Maybe it’s from a sacrifice. Maybe it’s goat blood.

You almost vomit a little in your mouth. 

“Well,” he says, stretching the word out, “to quote the host himself - “ he puts on a voice that is obviously meant to be you, which it’s not, it sounds nothing like you - “‘not before the party, I already did my hair’. Hate for you to fuck up all that hard work.” 

This is when you remember that Sollux Captor is very handy with a turn of phrase. (Pros: his dirty talk reigns absolute supreme and reduces you to shocked, stunned, horribly fucking needy silence. Cons: he pulls this innuendo/in-YOUR-endo bullshit on a regular basis.) 

“You’re right, I rescind my offer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have five hours to make the place presentable.”

You spend the next three hours doing exactly that; the two which follow are devoted to making dinner, and because you’re a proper Italian, you hand-make the fucking sauce. 

You’re devoted like that.

And also, you have the affliction that tells you to. Make the ziti, it croons to you. So you do. You make the ziti and you make the garlic bread and you buy nice wine; shit, it’s a New Year’s Eve party for fuck’s sake, you’d be better off getting a beer keg and some mini-quiches, but you refuse to stoop so low.

You are Eridan Ampora; you will not be having a kegger.

+++

Your invitations said five o’clock and so naturally you have people show up as early as 4:10, as late as 7:15. One guy shows up at 11:00 - literally /eleven/ o’clock PM at a damn New Year’s Eve party. Where the hell does Sollux meet these people?

(You don’t think to get pissed off, though, because by 11:00 you are fucking sloshed.)

Prior to that, however, you throw a very nice party. It would have been nicer if you’d accounted for the fact that everyone you invited has someone they want to invite. For example, inviting Kan means inviting LaLonde, and inviting LaLonde means inviting her douche-nozzle brother, and inviting douche-nozzle brother means inviting his “main man” John, who seems okay, but then _he_ brings his sister Jade because she could “really stand to get out more”.

If that were the only chain of events comprised as such, that would be one thing, but it’s not, and so at around 7:15 when the ziti’s supposed to be served you find yourself wondering who the fuck all these people are.

Some people bring siblings. Some people bring friends. Some people bring significant others. Naturally you have no way of knowing who’s connected to who; for instance, you know that Kan’s cool older sister who gave you that tattoo on your lower back as a 21st-birthday present is a popular girl and all, but you simply cannot tell if That Chick With The Glasses is her really good friend or if they’re both so drunk that everyone is a really good friend.

Well, that is one nice thing. Everyone - even douche-nozzle brother - brings some variant of booze. That’s pretty cool of them.

You’d planned an intimate get-together, a soiree, but instead you’d ended up with just shy of twenty people occupying your airspace. Sollux might be more annoyed than you are. It’s hard to say. You, on the other hand, put on your best-host smile and take it. 

The booze helps. 

You’re dipping into the sauce by nine and you’re tipsy by ten; that’s why, by eleven o’clock when some guy with messy, flippant curls and honest-to-fuck facepaint saunters in, you absolutely do not give a shit. He brings weed instead of booze, but hell, to each their own. He leaves it on the counter in what you are sure is a celebrational offering and no you didn’t steal his weed that’s crazy, you just moved it to your room because surely he must have meant to offer up his hash-stash in lieu of a few goddamn cold ones, on account of how you sure don’t see any goddamn cold ones.

You’re kind of an angry drunk. A reckless drunk, too. But above all else you are an impulsive drunk, and your behavior takes a turn for the worse when your BAC reaches point-five or so. 

You’re also kind of a lightweight.

“Let’s fuck,” you tell Sollux, like it’s the best idea anyone’s ever had. Yeah. You’re so smart. You’re sooo smart. And look at him, wearing that shirt. Yeah, he’s so into you right now. Holy shit. 

“You’re so fucking wasted,” he says back, and what’s lovely about it is that he is too. Shit, he’s been drinking since people got here. Yep, the two of you sure are nice and drunk right now. 

‘Cept, you aren’t drunk so much as you are...lightheaded, maybe. Just a tad drunk. Sort of drunk. Quasi drunk. 

You want to kiss his face. You want to kiss his face everywhere. 

Maybe you’ll kiss him everywhere anyway.

“...yeah,” you say. It slips out. You place a hand on his chest and slide the other up to his shoulder. It’s meant to be romantic, you’re sure it is, and you bet he doesn’t even notice that you’re leaning on him a little for support. 

“...I mean, no.”

Shit.

“You so are,” he says, and before you can react proper he reaches back and squeezes your ass. It takes you a few seconds to respond. In those seconds he gets in at least two or three more squeezes. 

Heh. He’s so fuckin’ into you.

“You’re...” You squint at him. You smile, real charming. “You’re a perv. Touchin’ my ass in front of all these people. How dare you. I’m offended.” All these people do not notice or care, too absorbed in their own business; the new year, for instance, or the tricky business of getting laid. 

You're _workin'_ on it. 

Sollux looks at you. “Well, you’re the one who said you wanted to fuck, didn’t you?”

And you concede that yes you did.

You make your way to your bedroom and oh, there’s a couple making out on your bed. Who is that? You tell them get the fuck out.

Kanaya looks up at you like a deer caught in the headlights; eyes wide open. Her lipstick is smeared, and you think she might not be wearing a bra. Her mocha-colored hair is disheveled. Her girlfriend is under her, face all flushed and oh, yep, she’s DEFINITELY not wearing a bra. Or a shirt.

You are so uninterested it is absolutely reproachful.

“I said, get the fuck out,” you say.

“Seriously, get a room,” Sollux adds. Unlike you, he's actually sort of staring, but you cut him some slack because he's trying and you fully intend to give him something else to stare out once you evict the lesbians. Shit, when you’re through with him, he won't even know what a lesbian is. 

You give him a pointed look.

“...just not this one,” he finishes. That’s better.

“You don’t need it,” Kanaya blurts out. “We were here first. Go find somewhere else.” And the thing about Kanaya is that you always listen to her - always. She’s really scary when she’s pissed, and right now she’s glaring daggers into you.

You take the opportunity to escort Sollux to the bathroom.

(You have no idea how this is going to work but what the flying hell, you’ve got a head full of booze and you’re completely, utterly, unabashedly down to fuck.)

So you go to the bathroom. You’re both kind of snickering by this point - after all, the idea of getting busy in a damn bathroom is really sort of funny. Without any idea of what to do, you ambush him with your lips in an incredibly sloppy, incredibly passionate kiss, pressing him against the back of the closed door. Wherein you taste the cheap champagne that John or Jake or Jimmy or Joey brought. Tastes delicious on Sollux; better than in the glass.

You’ve been making out for maybe a good minute before you drag him to the bathtub, and he looks at you like you’re high.

“You’re so fucking stupid, ED,” he says, using that nickname he knows you hate. “What the hell is wrong with you?” 

You crank the faucet to boiling lava hot before turning it down a notch or two for your boyfriend’s sake. 

Your clothes - white button down shirt, nice purple tie, black skinny jeans - are still on. Sollux isn’t wearing shoes, either, just a t-shirt and normal jeans, but he’s still got his socks on. He takes one look at you soaking wet and completely clothed, and the most beautiful thing about Sollux Captor is that he joins you. He joins you in the barely lukewarm bath water and climbs on top of you, and leaves sporadic little kisses all over your collarbone, your neck, your jawline. 

“You’re such an asshole,” he tells you. He whispers it in your ear and somehow you’re already half-hard. He smirks at you and you know he notices. He’s observant like that. “You’re so ready to go that you’re willing to fuck in a bathtub?” 

“Not for just anyone,” you assure him, and when he grinds down against you it makes you aware - painfully so - of what a Satanic device skinny jeans are. You moan under your breath. It reverberates really nice in the space of the shower/bath. 

“Need some help, princess?” You roll your eyes at him because he’s used your absolutely least favorite nickname. Princess. Hardly. You’re proud of your masculinity; you are very, very much male. He’s told you time and time again that the nickname denotes your behavior and not your gender, but you don’t care. 

You nod because it’s easier to let him do the work. 

Sollux rubs at your nipples (each one; he’s got a thing for symmetry) before making his way down to your stomach, your happy trail, your fly. You’re almost positive you’re gonna get head.

Score.

But you don’t; he gets your pants off by some means of miracle and then returns to sucking on your neck instead of your dick. You’re pretty sure that functioning adults don’t leave hickies on each other, that you haven’t even seen a hickey since eighth grade, but what do you know, who are you to say otherwise?

It feels nice, though. 

He feels you up and down while he macks on your neck. It's a little (a lot) messy and not to mention unorganized but you don't care, just fluff up his half-damp hair as the shower gets on you both. 

As far as you're concerned, he's never looked hotter. He's squinting without his glasses and yours are water-specked or maybe just waterlogged. His hair hangs in his face and occasionally he looks at you, kisses you on the mouth and ruts his hips against your thigh, makes eye contact while he does. You know you make the most ridiculous faces when youre turned on. It's a bad habit. 

"Fuck," you hiss, but you're laughing softly as his tongue flickers across your clavicle. He reaches a hand down and /oh/, that was pretty fucking sudden, how had he even gotten your pants down that far? They're around your thighs. You are almost positive you would have noticed him yank them down, but as long as he keeps yanking your cock you really do not give a damn. He shifts so that he's not full on riding you, just leaning lazily and sharing your space against the porcelain. 

"You like that, babe?" he asks you. Babe is his sex nickname; he never uses it outside of that context to you and consequently if he ever did you'd probably pop a completely Pavlonian boner. You shudder when he asks you now; shudder and try hopelessly to convey that why yes, yes you do. 

When Sollux strokes you it is hard and fast, which is how he does everything. It is how he breathes and how he moves and how he speaks and how he acts. Hard and fast. You are a different creature. You are languid and breezy and sometimes even lazy; though you’re incorrigibly impatient you prolong the inevitable, especially if it’s pleasant. When you touch yourself, you move your hand in slow, sweeping strokes. You put it off as much as you can. 

Because the fact of the matter is that despite yourself, you don’t mind the mild discomfort associated with this exercise. In fact, you happen to like the way it burns. 

The fact that Sollux has absolutely no time for anything like that is what makes it brilliant when he touches you. Here and now with your shoulder blade in a sweet embrace with one side of the porcelain, with your hips jerking up into his hand, with the now-freezing shower water cascading you both (although the presence of Sollux above you does block most of the water from getting to you, save for what has pooled around your back and exposed thighs) and hell, even with your legs spread awkwardly akimbo in the space of the bathtub, you are convinced that you’ve never felt anything more rapturous or beautiful. You are in a suspended state of awe as he jerks you off. Sometimes he teases but he’s almost always fast, fast and unrelenting, and the challenge is not coming far too quickly and all over yourself when he tells you--

“I noticed.” 

Of course he did. He’s really very observant. You know that.

You’re way too drunk to even pretend to have a sense of decorum or hell, even basic modesty. You rut up into his hand and he smiles like it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. (You wish you could control yourself better. Sollux is better about it, although only barely. He’s especially egregious when you give him head, but fortunately for him your gag reflex has always been kind of fucked up in the sense that it only works about half the time. Either that or you just take it like a champ. 

He captures your mouth with his, pumping you mercilessly, and between the water and his lips you feel like you’re drowning. You’re almost sure of it. You’re drowning and you died and this is it, this is the afterlife, you’ve gone to heaven and heaven is fucking in a bathtub.

It’s not the trashiest thought you’ve ever had, but it’s close.

Whatever, it’s cool.

In what should be awkward and terrible but is actually executed flawlessly (the booze helps - or hinders, but you don’t notice) he pulls you up so you’re riding him, all limbs and dripping clothes, straddling either side of his thighs. You take off your glasses; they’ve become a hindrance.

“Look at me,” he tells you, and for fuck’s sake you’re trying, but without your specs you might as well be blind.

You lean in to kiss his neck, sucking on it - hell, maybe you’ll return the fucking favor - and he wraps one hand around you to rest in your hair, while the other one reels back and smacks you on the ass. 

Your moaning is slightly muffled by the skin of his neck, but not really. 

The noise still kind of echoes, wet and lewd and filthy, and at first you don’t feel anything. It's warm and then it spreads and then you feel it, it stings like a bitch and you barely notice that you’re coming because all of your reactions are delayed, and also because alcohol diminishes the effects of your orgasms, because you’re that fucking unlucky. 

It’s still wonderful though. 

“Fuck, you’re loud,” he says, and you know it’s not a bad thing because if it were he’d probably have covered your mouth or something. You bite on his neck, really lightly, and he squirms - no, writhes. You love that about him. Sollux may be stoic but get him in bed and suddenly it’s a medium he doesn’t have control over. 

“Need some help, princess?” you ask him and he has the nerve to roll his eyes at you when you’ve got his dick in your hand. You’re annoyed at that much; after all, you’re pretty sure that was a clever callback to a comment he made earlier, not a legitimate insult. 

“That’s-- shit, that’s not pretty at all,” you tell him, and even though you can’t see shit you squint your eyes as if it’ll help. You pull back to get a good look at him; again, you can’t really, but you try all the same. He’s red all over. If your skin did that you’d probably be carmine. 

He tells you faster and you oblige only because it’s New Year’s, and also because it’s really cute when he begs like that. 

You are not lucid enough to take in everything, and there will come a time when you’ll wish you had. You’ll wish you’d been more observant; really felt his cock in your hands, felt the way it twitches when you smile at him or how he quivers when you rub yout thumb over the head. At some indeterminate point in the future you’ll want to capture how his moans, quiet and unobtrusive, worm into your skin and your hair and stick to your chest. 

You will want to see the face he makes. 

You will want to hold his warmth, juxtaposed against the chill from the showerhead, until the end of time. 

But you are drunk, and you are stupid, and you don’t do any of those things. You play the fool and you do go faster, greedy for him. You are a greedy idiot. 

You reach over him to turn off the water and he laughs, a spent little sound. It echoes most sublimely. 

“Does it make me a cliche asshole to say “Happy New Year”?” you ask him.

“Yes,” he tells you. “Say it anyway.”

You whisper it in his ear and at some point, you manage to fall asleep like that. You and he are lying discordant in the bathtub, you’re tangled in his arms, you’re leaving sticky kisses all over his chest. He tolerates the way you cling. You like that. 

This is how you begin day three-hundred-and-eight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thank yous to tumblr user eridansucksdick/ Andy for beta-ing this chapter.


	4. 135 Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains gratuitous non HS characters as I talk about Eridan's family.

**135 Days**   


The next few months fly by way too quickly. With February comes your birthday and Valentine's Day, both of which get legitimate recognition, which gives you a disproportionate amount of hopeless, hapless, and downright giddy joy when you stop to think about it. 

You were born on February 13th. No one remembers the day before Valentine's Day. But by some stroke of good fortune or maybe Facebook's birthday-reminder function, Sollux did. He took you out to this Chinese restaurant down on Mango Street you usually order from, and then you went to see some gloriously awful zombie movie, and when you came back you had earth-shattering sex that could have literally shattered the Earth and you wouldn't have noticed or cared. The next day you were both too tired to celebrate V-Day proper, so you watched re-runs on Netflix and ate cereal in bed and kissed each other languid and lovely -- and isn't the best way to spend a day? There's a reason neither of you have classes on Fridays. You remain convinced that you didn't sign up for Friday classes for the sole purpose of wasting time with the boyfriend you did not know you would have. 

Maybe it's fate.

You've always liked the idea of fate. 

March was full of nothing, a perfectly useless month. In the space between Febuary's lackadaisical romanticism and April's rush-rush go-go study for finals/don't fuck up/study for finals again madness lies the Trojan horse that is March. And so the two of you spent it doing absolutely nothing of any importance or value. You wrote a bunch of essays; he wrote a bunch of codes. The highlight of March was Spring Break, where neither of you went home and instead deigned to lounge around the apartment, fucking sometimes but more often than not watching TV and drinking whatever booze either of you could acquire. ("I brought home tequila!" you told him one day. "For God's sake, why?" "So we can feel like we went to TJ or somethin' instead of staying in Boston like assholes." You had to explain to him that TJ was Tijuana, that tequila was party booze, and then the two of you played 'I Never' for exactly two rounds until you ended up vomiting, ceaselessly, hugging the toilet and sort of crying while he petted your hair and murmured I-told-you-sos.) 

But mostly March was full of nothing. 

April was crunch-time, when you barely saw each other or for that matter anyone else. Feferi is a marine biology major and so you didn't see her at all except in Lang/Comp, the English class you were both dumb enough to flout as freshmen. You also saw Kanaya in Economics, but that, really, is it. Karkat and Sollux both go to MIT; you didn't see them. Terezi's in law school; you didn't see her. Because Karkat and Sollux and Kanaya and sometimes even Feferi happen to know lots of people that you do not, occasionally you were and are able to find out backwash, second-hand information from faces you recognize in classes. Like, okay, apparently Sollux had a big huge awful coding project; you don't know this from HIM, but rather from the terrifying girl with the glass eye who always stares at you from the bar when you take too long to order at The Cove. It's things like that - things of this specific nature that made April absolutely abhorrent for you. 

May is equal parts studying and horrible, encompassing laziness. You study your ass off for your finals (particularly for Education and Principles, which you are taking as you earn your teaching certificate -- and holy shit, apparently there's an entire Child Development chapter you skipped over in the textbook) and consequently, you ace them all with flying fucking colors. You aren't that highly ranked; it's Harvard, for fuck's sake. But your scores are phenomenal. 

At which point you give the world a giant 'fuck you' and do nothing but sleep and occasionally play video games for the rest of May. Your friends want to see you; you can't make yourself get up. Your boyfriend wants to see you; you can't let him see you so damn weak and tired and lethargic and fuckin' awful. 

You don't know what came over you, even to this day. 

Although skipping your meds probably contributed. 

When the Elontril is back in steady supply, you find yourself able to get up in the morning, and you even retain your sense of humor enough to see the irony in Sollux dragging you out of the house. It's not until you see everyone again face-to-face that you realize how much you've worried these people. Apparently you haven't answered your phone. And here you thought no one was calling. As fate would have it, everyone was. Fate. It's a funny thing.

You spend that day getting frozen yogurt with all of your friends, and then you go ice skating. You are pretty terrible at it. You fall on your ass at least five times and it gets to a point where Sollux literally cannot leave your side or else you'll fall again. The reason no one lets you fall again is because the ice rink manager threatened to kick everyone out the next time an eff-bomb was dropped. So Sollux skates with you, real slow, snickering and calling you a slurry of mushy pet names to rub salt in the wound. "Baby," he croons to you, "are you sure you don't need me to run off and get you some mittens? Or one of your scarves? I'd hate for you to catch cold." 

That was the last day of May. 

Your friends almost die laughing - even and to your shock especially Karkat. Their laughter only encourages him. You pretend to be mad, but you like the attention.

Today it's June 26, and you haven't had any such days since then. Sollux has gotten himself a summer job, because unlike you, his parents have cut him off. And you continue to work on your art. These are both more or less fruitless endeavors, with Sollux hating his job at a historical muesem for children more than life itself and you getting absolutely nowhere. (Sollux does look so cute, though, dressed up like a scrawny, surly Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, cute. You wouldn't dare call it hot; that's a level of degradation even you refuse to so much as touch. But you do wolf-whistle every day before he leaves the door, and every day he shoots you the bird. Sometimes you mean to ask if they're hiring, but it always slips your mind. Shit, what a fucking dream job that must be.) 

As for your art, it's just as terrible; it's terrible, however, because you are terrible. Skillfully torturous because you have no skill. Soul-sucking because you suck. Your paintings lack technique and all feature the sea as a giant, encompassing blob. Your writing is remarkably even worse, with choppy sentences in Chapter One and purple prose by Chapter Five. Maybe it's because you're rushing the whole thing. You just want to get to the end, because you're sick of this character and by this point you really want to kill the dumb bitch off. The thought makes you giddy. When you relate this to Sollux, he deadpan asks if he should call the cops or if you're going to turn yourself in, on account of how you're such a terrible murderer. Then he asks for help out of his military garb. You always oblige him. 

After all, if he did it himself, he wouldn't hang up the coat properly, and the medals - painted plastic that they are - would touch the ground. Perish the thought. 

Most of your other friends are visiting home, since most of them were not originally from Boston. Even Sollux wasn't born here, which makes you wonder how the hell everyone knows each other so well. Maybe they met online. You never ask. 

Feferi goes back to Florida (you cry when she leaves, which makes her giggle), Karkat returns to California, and Kanaya departs to New York. Being in Boston feels so disjointed and broken, with time zones splitting your social circles like broken shards of ceramic plates. You think about visiting home sometimes. And then you laugh your ass off, because you would rather fuck yourself with a chainsaw than even consider it.

You ask Sollux why he doesn't visit his parents, and he shrugs vaugely. They're back in Arizona, he says, and too busy for it to be worth the trip. It's good enough for you; it's also why you tell him without sparing any details that you have no intention of returning home, either.

You and Sollux share a smile and you even get up from typing out the wholly unerotic sex scene to kiss him on his powdered cheek before he departs. 

You are blissfully happy. 

Sollux isn't home when you get the phone call; you should know better than to answer it, the ring-tone like a red flag telling you to change phone numbers or even providers, to do anything other than answer.

It's Greased Lightning.

You haven't answered to Greased Lightning in months. 

But of course you do it anyway, of COURSE you do, and you minimize the word .doc on your screen because this phone call is going to take your full concentration. You know this because any conversation with Cronus requires your full concentration. Multitask and you might be surprised when he says something asinine. Multitask and you might misstep out of a window and fall on the pavement below like roadkill.

"Can I fuckin' help you?" you ask him, not bothering to answer with any decency or decorum because it's just Cronus, no big deal. This is the same older brother who would literally tackle you to try and persuade you into giving up your last bottle of hair gel, the only one in the house. This is the same sibling who would pin you down and dangle loogies in your face so you wouldn't tell Dad you caught him smoking. He does not and never will deserve your reverence. If your life had a rulebook, one of the big ones would be do not respect Cronus.

Although you suspect such a rule might be woven into the fabrics of life in general. Not just yours.

"Charming as ever, little man," he says back, and you roll your eyes even though he can't hear you. Force of habit. "I'm calling on Dad's behalf, actually. Nonna's throwing a Fourth of July party." 

"Well, shit," you say back, because while you might be inclined to ignore Cronus and maybe even your father under specific circumstances, you simply do not say no to your Nonna. It's not done. 

Fuckall.

"The fuck is she doing that for?" you ask. "She ain't American. Can't imagine why she cares." You drum your fingers on the desk, holding the phone up to your ear in your other hand.

"She's American now, stronzo," Cronus replies. He speaks Italian fluently and you do not and he rubs this in your face at every oppurtunity, particularly because he knows you understand it just fine, only limited by the constraints of summoning the words at free will. "She's visiting and you're coming. Dad already bought you a ticket."

 

"Aw, fuck," you say into the phone, and stand up from your desk chair. This is a phone call that will lead you to pacing. You can feel it. "That ain't even fair, Cro, what if I got plans? Huh? What if I got plans?" 

He snorts into the reciever. "Yeah, right. Like you'd have plans. Good one. I can tell Dad to buy your imaginary friend a seat on the plane, too. It'll have to be coach, though, since on such short notice there probably aren't any seats left up in first class."

"Whatever, whatever," you say dismissively. "It's fine, I'll take care of it. Does he care if I bring my boyf--"

You stop dead cold. 

"...uhh, whatever, so I'm gonna be there, alright? I'm packing already." You aren't packing. You're pacing most awfully. 

They don't know you're gay. They don't know you're anything; as far as Cronus and your father know, you are an asexual being because you've never had an SO that they got to hear about. 

"I'm sorry, what?" Cronus asks. You know he heard you. You can just tell he's about to erupt like a volcano of asshattery. This is the calm before the storm. This is the eye. 

"...uh..."

You're genuinely stumped.

You could try to cover it up, but why bother? You know he heard. Any attempt to lie would be foolish, pointless even, because as cunning and witty as you puport yourself to be, you are not a very good liar. You could try to play it up as a joke, but why would you joke about something like that? That would be pointless, too. 

You sigh. It's a long, elaborate song.

"I was gonna ask if he'd mind me bringin' my boyfriend," you say carefully. It strikes you that you've never once been so off-put by Cronus's silence. It's normally a warm welcome. Now, it gives you chills. 

"Oh," he says. You're sure you hallucenated, that's how quiet the sound is. It doesn't even sound like Cronus at all, really. It's too reserved of a noise, too unassuming. "So you're into dudes?" 

"Yeah?" you ask. You're not sure why you're asking. "Yeah, it seems that way. I mean, you know, I tried the whole...havin' sex with chicks thing-"

"Except you could never get a woman to sleep with you." 

"Fuck you!" You find yourself laughing, despite the circumstances. You're not entirely sure if he means the comment rudely - in a "meant to cause actual hurt" way - but you don't think so. "Like you're any fuckin' better. At least guys want me."

"Well, isn't that fortunate for you? You lucked out, Eri. Struck out with the ladies, so you switched teams. It's a smart  
maneuver. Tricky, but I think you can pull it off." You marvel at the providene bestowed upon you; you come out of the closet, and Cronus is not being weird. 

It's kind of like a miracle.

"Yeah, you could say that," you agree. You don't even fucking care. You're about to go earnest, to thank him for his outstanding display of non-douchebaggery, when you hear a voice in the background. 

"Merda," he murmurs. "Excuse me." You hear him cover the speaker with his hand. It turns out not to matter, though; you hear him loud and clear.

"Dad, can't it wait? Eridan's telling me he's gay." 

Well, that's one less phone call to make.

" _Cro_ ," you hiss at him. You talk over his half-asses protestations. "What the hell were you thinking? I wasn't exactly planning on comin' out under these circumstances, you know." 

"Relax, Eri, relax! At least it's one less phone call to make." 

Sometimes it scares you how much you're like your brother. Like, literally scares you.

"Besides, although I'm sure anyone who's batshit crazy enough to demean themselves by dating you is a real winner, Dad wouldn't let me bring anyone, either. So I'm pretty sure that you can't take him down here to meet the family or anything."

"As if you really had a date. Come on."

"Yeah, yeah. Gay or not, I'll believe someone's agreed to date you when I see some fucking proof, how 'bout that?" 

At some point you get tired of him and you hang up, not at all surprised to hear stone cold silence in the way of communication from your father. He didn't talk to you when he thought you were straight; why would that change?

Of course, the fact remains that you are still going to Florida. You get your e-ticket, forwarded to you from Cronus, later that day.

+++

"Oh," says Sollux when you tell him.

You meant to say something earlier. That was your intention. You'd made yourself some tea (with the advent of summer you've been on a tea kick) and sat on the couch and listened for the door. You'd expected everything.

What you had not expected was for Sollux to walk in the door bitching - bitching and disrobing and honest to God, you had never been more turned on in your life. How could you not be? He's hot when he's mad and he's hot in that (glaringly inaccurate) military get-u _those_ encounters, where you’re really sort of rough and he talks really dirty to you and he finishes inside, peeling off the rubber while you lay breathless on the bedspread and stare at the ceiling.

It’s a while later that you tell him; you’ve already cleaned up, and emerge from the shower with skin flushed blotchy red from turning the hot water up to the mask and hair dripping in your face. You’re in boxers and wearing one of his t-shirts. It doesn’t really fit right, but you like wearing his clothing. Smells good like his conditioner or soap or essence, really, and they’re ungodly soft. 

“So.....” You look at him. He’s in the same pajamas he’d worn last night, which is gross, but he’s at least taken a shower. He must have done it earlier. You were pretty out of it.

He arches his eyebrows, looking up at you from his laptop. “So?” His lisp is exacerbated and you guess it’s because he’s tired. It’s usually not so noticeable. 

(tho noticeable - okay that was mean) 

“So I’m gonna be gone for a week.” You peel off the band-aid.

And you’re shocked ‘cause he’s shocked.

“I leave on Sunday.” Today is Thursday. “Yeah, so my nonna wants to throw some kinda Fourth of July thing. And she’s makin’ the whole family come down to visit. It’s pretty lame.” You’re trying to play it off as Not A Big Deal. 

‘Cause, _shit_ , until Sollux had made that face at you, it hadn’t been, really.

He must be a telepath because his face settles into the cool apathy you’re accustomed to. “Oh, poor you. Having to spend time with your loved ones. Cry me a river.” You huff and cross your arms. He mocks the gesture.

Sometimes you think you could hate him. Just in these moments.

“Yeah, so, I’ll be gone for a week. Visitin’ my folks. Oh and I accidentally came out to Cro and he told my dad. Anyway, yeah, other than that I can’t think of anyt-”

“You did /what/ now?” 

“...yeah.”

You tell him all about the conversation, mocking your brother’s gratuitous Italian and general cadence while making the occasional side note to explain away aspects of his and your behavior -- “because he’s an /asshole/, that’s why, whose side are you fuckin’ on?” -- and he sits there almost amused as you recount the conversation. 

“You know, Eridan,” he says, leaning against the headboard, “your brother is right about one thing.”

“And what’s that?”

Sollux gives you one one of his crescent moon smiles - small but definitely there, the kind that light up his face. 

“Anyone would have to be batshit crazy to go on a date with you.” 

Your face heats up in mock-indignation. “Oh, o fuck yourself.”

“Nah,” he says languidly, “I don’t think I will, since my douchebag boyfriend just let me fuck him instead.” 

You hate it when he speaks to you that way. It’s demeaning. It’s demeaning and abasing and condescending to a fault, and although Sollux is all of these things, it still doesn’t give him the right to speak to you like you’re his little masochist ready to drink it like nectar. 

“You’re really gonna talk to me like that?” He makes a face like he’s considering it before he grabs one of your hands, envelopes it his own, and gives you the smile of someone who has the upper hand.

“Yeah, I think I am. You really expect me not to?” 

You tell him that he’s a cheesy asshole, which he is. You adore him so.

+++

He’s a lot less on top of things when it’s time for you to actually leave. (Sollux has to be in a certain mood to tease you like that. Just like you have to be in a certain mood to fucking tolerate it. You usually don’t mind it terribly, though.) He doesn’t do something stupid like cry, God forbid, but he does tell you to leave your best jeans at home because he’d rather you not look dressed up unless he’s there to supervise. You pack relaxed-fit jeans and t-shirts just for him. 

“I’ll miss you,” you say, and you have to cover it up the second you say it. “Try not to die or anything while I’m gone.” 

Your obsession with death is going to get you in trouble someday.

“I’ll try,” he tells you. “No promises.” 

You board the plane and sleep the whole way there, even though it’s 3:00 in the afternoon.

+++

The week drags like molasses and has all the excitement of standing in the DMV -- until one night you’re all eating dinner and out of absolutely nowhere your nonna asks, “So, Eridan, how do two men make love?”

You choke on your cannoli. 

Your aunt Alessandra has to give you the goddamn Heimlich maneuver.

“What?” Cronus asks, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Neither can you. You sit there in paralyzed silence with your mouth dropped open. 

Cronus takes the opportunity to tell you to close it or else a dick he means fly might fall in. 

“Well, I could have guessed that,” she says thoughtfully. You’re pretty sure you want to die. “But it’s not the same as with a woman. How do you do it?”

Your dad gets up and leaves. Lucky bastard.

“Uh...well, yeah, it’s not the same,” you say. Your aunts and uncles and cousins are all staring at you. Most of them are not as naive as Nonna. Most of them know. You can see it in their eyes. 

“But how do you - “ She presses her lips shut and asks the question again, in Italian. Like that makes it any easier.

“Well, I mean, there’s ways- like, fuckin’, I’m not talking about this, okay, I’m done.” 

“You’re breaking your old Nonna’s heart, Eridan. You’re a bad grandson.” 

“Yeah, Eri, tell Nonna how you screw.”

Thanks, Cronus. 

You’re about to think of a way to evacuate when she asks you again, waving her hands wildly, gesticulating and repeating the question in Italian and asking how the hell you can have sex without a woman and by that point you’re pretty much done.

“For God’s sake, Nonna, I have two hands!” 

No one says anything. You hear your cousin Isabella open her mouth to say something or other when Cronus interjets.

“You know, Nonna,” he says, real casually, “I dunno about Eri, but lots ‘o guys do it up the butt.”

“Ohhh,” she says. “That makes more sense.” 

You hate your fucking family and that pretty much marks the end of the meal. 

+++

You’re alone with Nonna in the car because all of your asshole family is still asleep prior to noon, and Nonna needs her medicine, and you’re pretty sure you need yours, too. 

“Eridan,” she says, and just in those syllables you wince. You’re driving your old violet Volvo down the road, and whatever the hell she’s about to say is something you’re sure you don’t want to hear.

“Nonna,” you tell her, “I don’t give a good God damn if you or any of the others approve of me or my life. Because it’s my fuckin’ life. And I’m fuckin’ happy. I have a boyfriend and I’m happy and he’s happy and that’s all that matters.”

She doesn’t say anything for what feels like too long. You drive silently down the road; the radio isn’t even on, so you’re driving alone and silent and your hands are shaking against the wheel. 

“I’m very proud of you,” she says in Italian. It seems like it means more and you blink back hard because the last thing you need is a car accident at a time like this. “Even though I don’t agree with your choosing to - “ she gestures as she grapples for the phrase “ - sleep with men, I am very proud of you for not taking anyone’s shit.”

It takes you a while to formulate a response. She doesn’t support you - but she does. She loves you - but not your choices. You wonder if you’ll ever be able to bring home Sollux. You decide you don’t want to; at least, not while you’re still so ashamed of them. 

Still, when you think of how hard it must have been for Nonna to swallow her pride, there’s really only one thing you can say.

“Grazie.” 

You mean it.

+++

Sollux meets you at the airport and even though you’re jet-lagged and tired as all fuck and sunburnt from your brief expeditions out in the sun, he doesn’t care. 

That’s so nice of him. 

You’ve missed him terribly and you don’t even realize it. It’s basically a big problem how sane he keeps you. Even worse how you didn’t notice. You’re excited to see your friends, of course, but you feel as though being away from Sollux has made you kind of crazy. 

That’s a terrible feeling to have, you overly dependent bastard. 

Your mind is racing to tell him about everything you had to suffer through, but instead you pull him real close and kiss him hard on the mouth in front of everyone at the fucking airport. Although you love your grandmother and are glad to have her support, you realize that you genuinely wouldn’t give a damn if she hated you from now ‘til forever for having the audacity to fuck guys. And it strikes you as you hold him that you might be falling in love. It’s been six months. Like common symptoms to a pantheon of maladies, it is simply too early to say.

All the same, you need to kiss him; you need the showy display. You pull away and he looks at you not with his shit-eating grin or his better-than-you smirk, but with his crescent smile, and you want him very much. Not even sexually, although you miss him like that, too. You just want him. 

“I didn’t die,” he says right by your ear.

“Thanks,” you say back.


	5. 63 Days

**63 Days**

There are days that pass between your homecoming and this particular autumn afternoon. Summer is lazy and lingering; you consider these days the lost days, lost forever and to what you aren’t sure. It feels as if the passage of time is chopped and discordant. One day you’re watching the super-old Doctor Who episodes and debating with Sollux whether or not to hand-make the pasta sauce for dinner or buy the canned shit - and then, the next, it’s August, and you almost have to start existing again as a functioning member of society.

Perish the thought.

These days which pass, lazy more than anything and easily forgettable, are some of the happiest you’ve ever known.

Today starts like any other.

At first, you count it by hours.

**8:00 AM**

You are not accustomed to waking up early, but for whatever reason, today you do. It strikes you as annoying more than anything else, with perhaps a dash of serendipitous. You’ve been wanting to something cool or interesting or special since you got back from Florida. 

(This thought doesn’t strike you until half-way through your scalding, boiling-lava-hot shower. You are not capable of any human kindness until you endure your morning masochistic shower.)

So you decide to make breakfast for you and your completely unappreciative boyfriend. You do it because you have the energy and you’re in the mood, and also because you can’t wait to see his face when you wake him up before noon. Heh.

Anyway.

(Okay, for the record: it’s not like you enjoy seeing him upset. Really. It’s not. But you woke up before noon and as far as you’re concerned, it’s - fuck, it’s some kind of divine providence, telling you that today is a great day to be a dork with your boyfriend. You can’t do that with your boyfriend KO’d. End of story.

And also, he’s really cute when he’s grumpy and pissy, which when he wakes up, he is.)

You open the fridge and find it almost barren, which eliminates any hope you’d had about making a good breakfast. Granted, you’re a culinary genius; you often brag about being able to craft ambrosia from three pickles and a tub of mustard. Faced with these conditions, however, you find yourself drastically unable to put your money where your mouth is. Coincidentally, if you put your mouth anywhere near the motley crew of almost-foods in the fridge, you might give yourself food poisoning. There’s half a gallon of probably rotten milk, an energy drink that you aren’t allowed to touch, some questionable eggs, some equally questionable strawberries, and a bag of semisweet, semi-eaten chocolate chips. (You think you might have meant to make mousse, but you’re not sure.) 

You check the cabinets. Jalapeno cheetos (your guilty pleasure) and off-brand Pringles (his). What ends up saving your ass in the end, however, is a bottle of champagne that New Years’ never touched and a box of pancake mix.

Fucking _score_.

And so you make chocolate-chip pancakes and scrambled eggs. After all, putting shit in skillets gets rid of bacteria, right? (Or is that boiling? Whatever, it’s cool. You tested the eggs to see if they sank or not, and they did. Google says fresh eggs sink. You are a genius, or just really lucky.) In lieu of an actual nutritious, useful beverage, you have booze. Part of this complete breakfast. 

**9:00 AM**

It’s actually a bit closer to 9:15 by the time you have the table set and breakfast looking presentable. After all, any good chef knows that presentation is half the work. More pressingly, if you drizzle what’s left of the chocolate syrup you found rolled away in a remote corner of the kitchen on the plate, it looks a lot like you might know what the fuck you’re doing. Real fancy. Real convincing.

You don’t, of course, but in this crazy, lackadaisical world where appearances mean everything, it’s a relatively easy trick to pull. As it happens, you’re particularly experienced with the fine art of wrapping something mediocre in ludicrously lavish wrapping.

But that’s neither here nor there.

You snag the champagne bottle, which you’ve kept cooling in the fridge. You press it against your hands, feeling the smooth, cool glass against your skin. You shiver.

You go back to your room, where you remember quite candidly waking up and seeing Sollux. 

“Good morning, beautiful,” you say, at the top of your lungs and in so ostentatiously that even you cringe a little. He reaches over and grabs your pillow, placing it over his head. You sit down next to him and snatch it away.

“I made breakfast,” you say, saccharine-sweet like it’s Stepford. “So get your fat ass out of bed.” 

He stares up at you with the truest, fiercest, most terrible hatred you have ever seen.

It’s sort of hot, but you’re able to ignore that, if you must.

God, his hair is a fucking mess. Moreso than usual.

“Bite me,” he says, and usually he knows better than to accost you with such a delicious turn of phrase to twist. It’s kind of like “fuck you”; it’s off the table, almost, because the second one of you says it, the other promptly asks “when?” It’s a joke and also not.

“That can wait until after breakfast,” you tell him, and he sits upright just so he can roll his eyes at you. Sometimes, you suspect, he resents you and your ceaseless wordplay. Not like you can stop it. It’s woven into the essence of your being, leaving you absolutely incorrigible, irreparable, and completely victim to his reproach.

“The fuck did you ‘make’? We haven’t bought food in, like, ever.”

Good boy. He’s waking up.

“You’re absolutely right,” you agree cheerfully. “But I made do. Get the fuck up and be grateful already.”

Your patience for his bullshit is wearing thin. Cute as he is when he’s half-awake and grumpy, he’d be a hell of a lot cuter if he’d get with the fucking program.

“I don’t want to eat whatever the hell you found when you went spelunking into the freezer,” he tells you. He’s all frowns and angles, but to his credit he sits upright. He squints at you. “What’s in your hand?”

Your right hand is empty; you’d snatched away your pillow with it, only to throw it on the ground. He is, however, correct. You’d taken the champagne, remember? The neck of the bottle is warming from being in your hand.

You smile serenely.

“Well, the milk’s rotten and you won’t share your Monster. So.” Instead of finishing your sentence or dropping off completely, you let the word trail off, filling the air with possibility and chance. You gently shift the covers away, watch as he flinches when the cold air hits him, and you press the champagne bottle against his thigh. He squirms and looks at you like you’re horrible. Maybe you are. Who can say? 

“What the h-” He looks down at the bottle and you roll it idly on his skin. The place where he ought to have continued his train of thought is empty as he looks down and sees what exactly you’re doing. “I didn’t know we had any left.” 

“Neither did I. It was by the pancake mix.” Sitting on the edge of your bed, you decide to occupy more space, forcing him to move over by virtue of the fact that he is small-framed and scrawny whereas you are not. 

“You don’t say,” he murmurs flatly. “Whatever. I guess I’ll eat. Not really hungry,” and he says ‘hungry’ like the word’s a javelin and he’s aiming for your chest.

Your heart hurts for him so.

“You’re so boring,” you tell him, just as flatly. You hardly even mean it. Sollux Captor is quite a lot of things and not all or even half of them are good, but ‘boring’ doesn’t make the list. Even when he’s doing things that do not involve you, which are boring in their own right, they’re still actually pretty cool. It’s hard to get mad when the reason you’re turned down sex is because your boyfriend is trying to hack into NOMAD, for fuck’s sake. 

(But sometimes it’s just because he’s watching The Guild again and then you have a reason to be pissed proper.)

You decide, in light of this, not to warn him before you pop open the cork. Fizzy light-as-air bubbles dance on your skin and you can see on his face the second he stops being pissed.

“You’re so fucking stupid,” he tells you. You take a cup that he keeps on his endside table, which doesn’t have water in it today, and pour it full of champagne. Setting the bottle down, you indulge your inner lush and down the whole thing. It's not even noon yet, but here you are. 

Then you turn his head with your champagne-sticky hand and kiss him hard on the mouth. You keep it closed (he doesn’t taste sweet and sugary and bubbly like you do, he’s only just woken up) but you’re convinced the message is still recieved.

He looks at you like you’re Satan’s spontaneous spawn.

“I said I’d eat, you know,” he says. 

“Good,” you say back.

**10:00 AM**

So you dine like kings on your slovenly hobo breakfast. (Sollux makes fun of you for the chocolate syrup, and then brings up the last time the two of you used it and why it was on the floor. You almost pop a boner at breakfast and all he can do is snicker, bastard that he is.) 

Eventually you clean up and he tells you that, now that he’s actually awake, he has actual work to do. Two essays and a Big Scary Coding Project. 

You frown almost immediately, because that inevitably means today will be another lost day, another day that’s not truly yours. 

“When’s that shit due?” you ask. You’re a chronic procrastinator, sometimes to the degree that you purposefully write down the wrong due date in your planner so you’ll buy yourself an extra day for tests and projects and whatnot. You know for a fact that Sollux is the exact opposite, typically getting his work done the day that it’s assigned, because he’s fuckin’ crazy and basically can’t be helped. 

“I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to get this all done, Eridan,” he says back. “I’m fucking awful at writing essays, and this particular project involves Malbolge, which was originally not even made by humans. For all intents and purposes, it came straight from Hell.” 

“Malbolge? “ you ask. “You mean like Dante?” 

And that’s how you find out that, for all intents and purposes, the gross boring code Sollux has to work with really did come straight from Hell. 

“The purpose of Malbolge is to prevent people from making programs with it. My assignment is to find a loophole in that.” 

(This is around the point where you stop being able to tell what the fuck he’s talking about. You instead find yourself picturing the Malebolge that his programming code stuff is derived from, land of ditches and home to the fraudulent.)

When you snap out of it, you shake your head vehemently. “C’mon, can’t you do it later? I was-” 

You find yourself unable to phrase what it is you want to say. 

“You were..?” he asks haltingly. “C’mon. Spit it out.” His lisp is worse when he’s annoyed, not unlike the way your supposedly speech-therapy-cured stutter tends to rear its head when you’re especially angry, or especially shitfaced. 

“I was just gonna...I don’t know. Make today fun. For some reason. Not really sure why. Forget it, it’s stupid.” You retreat to your room. 

Painting is something you understand; you aren’t all that good at it, really, and you’ve never once taken an anatomy class so consequently your people look like monsters and your monsters look like they lurked out of a low-budget hentai, but you understand it and to a certain degree you enjoy it. The same holds true for writing, though you’re only marginally better with the written word. Words don’t bend to your will by any means, and your sentences are either florid and difficult to get through or they’re short, choppy nightmares. Your characters, while intriguing, are riddled with angst and disease and can’t seem for even one second to stop wailing and gnashing their teeth. They annoy you. 

All the same, painting is something you understand, and you find yourself engrossed in a particular scene you’ve been working on, a painting of the ocean. While it really isn’t anything special, painting it engrosses you in a way you really never thought possible. 

Sollux doesn’t knock or anything. You think you hear him typing outside, but the thought only occurs to you for a second or two at most before you return to your work.

**11:00 AM**

You’re genuinely shocked when he opens the door. 

“I--wow,” he says, interrupting himself as he takes you in. You look down. There’s paint all over your shirt, which you paint in all the time and as such have already stained with paint a million times, all over the splendid portrait of Amanda Palmer. There is also paint on your jeans, your hands, and - you suspect - your face. You blink.

“Can I help you?”

“You look-”

“Like shit, yes, I’m aware. It’s called _art_ ,” you tell him, “now get on with it already.” You have a paintbrush in your hand that you’ve been gesticulating with, and you set it down on your easel. 

“Don’t get that shit on the bed,” he replies. “Anyway, I was gonna tell you that since I finished one of my essays, I’m done for the day.” He doesn’t elaborate, but you understand quite fully what he is getting at. He is extending you an olive branch, and you are convinced, in this moment, that he is the best.

“Let’s watch a movie,” you say back. He raises his eyebrows at you. Your fervor sometimes shocks him; you don’t think it, you know it. He’s the one on bipolar meds, but occasionally you think you ought to be. You find yourself enraptured and ecstatic and electric and kinetic on some days, wanting to seize the day and everything else. Some days, you have energy. And then other days you take two Elontrils instead of one and it’s all you can do to function. Maybe you’re misdiagnosed.

Or maybe you’re just a spontaneously-driven, rarely-motivated shit. 

“If you can actually decide on a movie, fine. If not, I’m picking.” This is a threat of the highest caliber, mainly because Sollux has notoriously shit-awful taste in movies. When you met him you pegged him for sci-fi, a real Joss Whedon kind of fellow, which you could actually respect. Instead, he picks the most mainstream, blockbuster garbage. It transcends genre. You ask for drama and you get Hunger Games, which you couldn’t enjoy because the books were better. You try for comedy and you get Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which you couldn’t enjoy because you abhor physical humor and might have even fallen asleep. You compromise for action and you get fucking Micheal Bay, which - save for Transformers, that shit was choice - speaks for itself. When you pick the movie, everything goes smoother, because although Sollux does tell you that your taste in movies is obscure or even weird, everyone’s happier on the whole when you get your way. This is how it works on movie night at your apartment. 

“Moulin Rouge,” you tell him. 

“Already seen it.”

“Bullshit.”

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return,” he cites, rolling his eyes pointedly as he quotes the pivotal line of the movie in a bored tone of voice. You swear softly under your breath.

After a few more minutes of conversation that essentially repeats himself, you find Heathers, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Strangers With Candy, and American Beauty nixed; some of them he’s seen, some of them he’s seen with you, and some of them he will not sit down for. He reminds you more than once that he’s accommodating you and although that’s pretty much a bitch move on his part, it’s a successful one. 

“What about Stepford Wives,” you say on a whim. It’s not your favorite; the remake is pretty good, although the last time you watched it you were irrevocably stoned, which might be why your opinion on the film is ambivalent at best. In fact, you’re not even sure why you suggested it, but it’s on Netflix and with your DVD player on the fritz, your options are considerably limited. 

He looks at you like you’re a little bit crazy, but he shrugs his shoulders. “Sure, okay,” he says. “I guess.” 

This is about as close to enthusiastic as you’re ever really able to get out of him when it comes to what he affectionately refers to as “bullshit couple stuff” and what you tend to call “things that every fucking couple in the world does so sit the fuck down and don’t complain”. 

To his credit, he doesn’t. 

+++

One of the strangely recondite things you recall from high school is the fact that women who have children produce a chemical in their brains that keeps them from looking at their kids and remembering the horrible pain, screaming, and genital trauma associated with childbirth, probably because without that chemical the human race would have gone extinct eons ago. You don’t remember the chemical’s name or the specific occurrence of it or really anything other than that; you do, however, heavily suspect that you have something similar wedged up in your brain, something powerful, because the erasure of Sollux’s abhorrent behavior from your memory is absolutely fucking incredible. It should be studied by scientists.

Watching a movie with Sollux is kind of like watching a movie with a three year old; he doesn’t talk, which you could probably deal with because your own worst movie habit is talking through movies, and even then, you wouldn’t have to talk during movies if Sollux would pay attention to the important parts. Instead, he fidgets constantly, and when he finally manages to get comfortable, if that ever even happens, he gets up to get some off-brand Pringles and a Monster, the last one in today’s case, which he laments. “Don’t pause it,” he says. 

So you pause it. 

“What the fuck did I just say,” he tells you, but you arch your eyebrows at him and he sits back down. 

In the case of this particular movie, he does all of that and a little bit more; right when the protagonist discovers that her camp-gay best friend has been assimilated to behave and think just like every other Stepford wife despite his technically non-married status, Sollux leans over and asks you -

“Doesn’t this offend you a little bit?” 

“How do you figure?” If Sollux were a normal person you might take this to mean that he was offended, but he’s bisexual-not-gay and you know he’s not; he’s asking if you are offended and you do have to look at him like he’s a little bit crazy for even asking. 

“What, ‘cause the gay guy’s, like, offensively stereotypical? Yeah, some’a that shit’s kinda based on truth, you know? I mean, not EVERYONE acts like that, but I’ve known guys who do go around all dramaticlike and obsessed with clothes an’ shit.” 

He looks at you for a little bit too long and you narrow your eyes at him, but that’s as far as that particular train of thought progresses and neither of you elaborate.

Near the end he gets up and you’re genuinely confused as to why, since he’s already gotten up to take a piss like, at least three times, and he’s still not out of go-go juice or shitty Nice! brand chips. You’re almost a little worried; it takes him a few minutes, and this time you didn’t even pause, since he said he’d be right back. You furrow your brow and you’re thisclose to calling for him.

And then he comes back with his laptop.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” you ask him, and he looks at you like you’ve spontaneously grown a third eye in the middle of your forehead.

“I thought I’d multitask. Get some shit done, since you keep talking during the movie and it’s hard to focus on, anyway.”

“I keep talking during the movie because you’re never here during the important parts.”

“Look, no offense, but it’s a pretty simple movie to understand. You’d have to be an idiot not to know that the wife is secretly the leader of the whole thing.” 

Though you sunburn if you so much as step outside after June, you do not blush; it’s not in your genetic code. But you do flush most spectacularly when you’re pissed off, and right now, red simply does not cover it. You are scarlet. You are vermilion. 

You want him out. 

“Get the fuck out. I can’t look at you.” You try to keep your tone calm and clipped, but you’re really bad about that. One of the most awful things about Sollux is refusal to rise to your bait; you’ve said some truly terrible shit to him in an effort to get him pissed, but he simply won’t fight unless he’s pissed off, first. (And when he’s pissed off first, he’s low and whisper quiet, while you scream at him and occasionally throw destroy furniture that you know can be replaced. One time you broke a lamp and you both stopped fighting and laughed uproariously because thank-fucking-God, that tacky piece of shit had finally kicked the bucket and you could get rid of it. Wouldn’t be economical to do so prior.) 

“Kay,” he says, staring at his screen. You’ve gotten up off the couch and started pacing, and from behind him you can see he’s watching some shit on YouTube, some game review that’s exactly nine minutes and twelve seconds long. 

“No,” you say back, “I want you to get your bony ass out of the apartment I pay rent for because if you don’t I will not be responsible for my actions.” 

“Ooh. Frightening.” 

Since you certainly can’t use the threat of your relationship to get him to leave you alone for awhile (you’re way more into it than he is, as a general rule) and since you loathe leaving the apartment for any rhyme or reason, you go into his room. You’re pretty sure you can feel him look up. 

“Oh, wow, look at this thumb drive! It’s so small, I hope I don’t accidentally flush it down the toilet!” You hear stomping and when you look up, you see him in the doorway. You smile sanguinely. 

“Get your hands off of my shit,” he tells you. You laugh. It’s not a very pretty sound.

“Nah,” you reply. “I’m having fun. Got you to pay attention to me real-proper, and, well, isn’t that anyone who acts out really wants?” You hum to yourself as you grab a book off his shelf and start flipping through it. Looks like passwords. “This is fun,” you say cheerfully. “I think I’ll use it to balance my hand when I paint my nails. Because, you know. Stereotypically gay. That’s a thing I do.” You tuck the book under your arm.

“You’re insane,” he tells you. His lisp is way worse when he’s all angry and you almost laugh at him, but you have the decency not to (especially since you stutter way worse). 

“Not really. All I wanted was for my fucking boyfriend to sit down with me for, what, an hour?”

“Ninety-three minutes.”

“So you looked it up. You looked it up so you’d know exactly how long you’d have to put up with the laborious task of spendin’ time with me. Fuck you.” 

“Oh, so now I’m Satan because I Googled a fucking runtime?”

“If I were you, I’d pick an insult I could actually pronounce. Shit, even Lu-thi-fer would have sounded less stupid.”

“That’s a low fucking blow. You’re better than that.”

He’s right. You never stoop that low. 

“Can’t you just leave me alone for awhile?” you ask, tossing down his dumb password book. “You obviously don’t want to be here, anyway.” 

He looks at you for a moment. “Fine,” he says. “You want me gone? I’ll go. You’d better pray to high fucking Heaven that I don’t find someone better and not come back.” 

“Like you could. Like anyone else would put up with your shit. I think _you’d_ better pray to high fucking Heaven that I’m still here when you come _crawling_ back, because we both know I’m the best fucking thing to ever happen to you.” 

He laughs so hard that it bounces off of the walls. 

“I put up with you. I tolerate you. I deal with you.” He counts them off on his fingers one by one. “Look, I think I’m gonna bounce on my accord now, thanks ever so much. Could deal without the abusive boyfriend shtick.” He grabs his backpack off of the kitchen counter and he’s gone before you can reply.

He’s real good at that, getting the last word in.

+++

**1:00 PM**

You know he’ll come back, of course. 

You feel like you ought to be worried, but you aren’t. Not this time. You’re also still a little bit pissed at him and right now you’re really proud of the fact that you don’t cry angst-man-tears until you hear the door close. 

The fact is that you two fight constantly, and you really only wanted him gone so you could call Feferi. That’s why when she doesn’t answer, you really start to feel awful. 

(You are only capable of guilt after an attempt to call Feferi or an actual conversation with her has happened. Sometimes you feel like she has some of your feelings in a vault somewhere in her head, and that maybe you have some of hers, and that’s why she’s got a double dose of happiness or guilt while you’ve got a little extra anger or despair. It’s one of those dumb thoughts you have when you ought to be sleeping at three AM that sticks to you like bubblegum on a mantleplace.)

You call Sollux twice and he doesn’t pick up. The third time you hit his voicemail, you decide to leave a message; Sollux ignores you a lot, but he’s told you before that he always listens to your meandering, confused voicemail messages. 

“Hey, Sol,” you say into the phone. “Not really pissed. Hope you aren’t. You prob’ly deserve better so if you find someone willing you fuckin’ go for it....except not really, because your stuff is here. And I’m here. And I wish I hadn’t told you to leave. Yeah. Bye.” 

You wish you could delete it, or unsend it, or unspeak it, but there’s no mercy for the wicked.

Without the presence of Sollux and with Feferi working or ignoring you, you find yourself no longer in want of human contact.

Back when you lived in Florida and cancerousGerminiation was your best and only Skype friend and long before the both of you ended up getting much cooler screennames, Karkat Vantas was basically the reason you logged on at all. He was in Boston and you were in a suburb of Edgewood, but that didn’t matter. (Sollux isn’t from here and neither is anyone other than Karkat. It is nothing short of miraculous that the accent does not spread to foreigners or else he might need to be quarantined.) You talked every day and even video chatted, and for a brief stint of time you were even internet boyfriends, although you don’t talk about that. 

But apparently in real life, Sollux is his best friend, and that’s all there is to say about it. (You could argue that the stoner from the mid-Atlantic is his real best friend, since Karkat has broken his back for that son of a bitch and none of you ever understand why.) You come second. It’s why when you call him, he doesn’t answer either, and in fact you know he’s probably texting Sollux that you tried to call him. It leaves you with a sick kind of feeling, kind of like despair but not nearly as potent. 

You think about painting again when you look down at your clothes, but what little muse you’d had has left you. Your burning passion has vanished and you’d like to vanish right along with it.

You don’t really know what to do at all.

When you see Stepford Wives still paused on your TV your stomach sinks in your chest and you have to change it. 

Whatever channel it’s on, some show involving organized crime and the women who love it is playing now on your television set. You’re okay with it. You look at Sollux’s laptop sitting next to you on the couch, but you don’t touch it; instead, you grab your iPhone from the end table where it had been charging and read the rest of Dante’s Inferno from where you’d left off some time ago, starting with the river Styx, reserved for the wrathful who act on impulse.

+++

**2:00 PM**

He’s not back yet.

But to be fair, you skimmed. You go back and read the parts you looked over. 

+++

**3:00 PM**

You call him again. It goes straight to voicemail. 

+++

**4:00 PM**

This is when you genuinely start to worry, and about ten minutes later, he walks right through the door.

He drops his backpack and you find yourself embracing him, even though he squirms in your arms. You forget for a moment that you’re supposed to be pissed. You step away. 

Dark brown hair a little discordant and mismatched eyes looking at you with reproach, is Sollux Captor, completely unscathed or damaged or broken or hurt. 

“Where the fuck were you?” 

“Out. Like you wanted, remember?” 

“No, let’s not do that, I ain’t even mad anymore, I don’t care. You didn’t answer when I called. You were gone for four hours, what the fuck do you even do for four hours?” 

“How’s that any of your business? We were fighting, of course I didn’t answer your calls. Plus you were being annoying, anyway. Nice voicemail message.” His lips quirk up into a smile, and you hate how he can just grin at you and make you feel like everything’s fucking normal. “I ran into KK. We went to Gamestop and got coffee. Shit coffee,” he adds, when he sees your face light up. 

“Oh,” you say back. “I thought you were dead.”

“You fucking wish.” 

“Yeah, no kidding.” 

You hug him again and this time he hugs you back. He’s got a little bit on you in height, although not much; you’re not as skinny as he is, a trifle more muscular, but since you’re an artist and not a jock you look pretty average in the way of physical build. You’re also uncannily freezing, always freezing, and where you lack warmth, Sollux simply has it in spades. 

He’s so warm when you hold him.

“Sorry I was an asshole,” you tell him.

“Yes, you were. Sorry I was a dick.”

“Sorry I was a bastard.”

“Sorry I was a fucker.”

“Sorry I was a cock sheath.”

Both of you laugh more than you should at that, and although neither of you actually addressed the things you did wrong, you know that you don’t really have to. That’s not how you operate. Where other couples talk things out, you put them away in the back of the closet. It’s economical and, above all else, easy.

You sit down on the couch; Sollux sits next to you. Neither of you look at his laptop. 

“Mob wives? Really?” he asks you. You look up at the screen and see that he’s right. “What, are you trying to get back to your roots?”

“For the last time, I’m not in the _mob_ , fuck you.”

“I never said you were,” he says back. “Not sure about Nonna, though, I think she might be up to something.”

“If Nonna were Mafia, she’d kick your ass. Hell,” you add, “if I were Mafia, I’d kick your ass.”

“Really?” He looks like he’s considering something; you’re not completely sure what. “You wouldn’t throw me in Mass Bay to sleep with the fishies?”

You snort. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’d rather throw myself there than do somethin’ so played out.” 

You watch the rest of Mob Wives in relative silence and how you end up making out, you’re not entirely sure.

+++

**4:30 PM**

You’re so fond of straddling his lap that sometimes he makes fun of you for it. Today, he does not; just lets you climb up on top of him and squeezes your ass the second you're settled. You’d be a little bit annoyed if it didn’t get you so hot. 

Sometimes, also, when the two of you split the heat on your practically garbage couch, you talk to each other. Say smart little things to get each other interested. Today, neither of you feel like it, and anyway there’s nothing you could say that would make pulling away from him worth it. He tastes like good coffee. What a fucking liar. 

He slides a hand up the back of your shirt and you move down to treat his neck to kisses, spattered across his skin like paint on a canvas. His hands are warm; it’s a real treat. He runs his fingers real gently up across your spine, and then brings his nails down so they scratch your skin. It’s not too harsh, but just harsh enough to make you squirm in his lap. 

Often when the two of you fight, the heat and anger of the fight translates to sexual tension and you end up fucking on the nearest flat surface. Just as often, when you’re sitting around kissing, one of you gets a little rough. You’re used to it. So is he.

You aren’t sure how much of it is Sollux and how much of it is you, but sometimes you think that when you’re fighting, you’d rather be having sex. Likewise, you suspect that sometimes when you’re having sex, Sollux would rather be fighting.

It’s a process.

You’re not all that languid when you kiss him, just slow; there is a difference. He gropes your ass again and you kiss harder. Might make a mark. Oops. 

You are about to get in his shirt when something terrible happens. 

There’s a knock at the door.

“Uh,” he says, and he looks just as perplexed as you feel. In short, you don’t get visitors, and when you do, they fucking give notice. (Without a doubt, both of you would rather be fighting or having sex or doing them both than entertaining unannounced guests.) 

“Want me to get it?” you ask. You aren’t hard and he is and it only seems polite, all things considered. You don’t wait for him to answer, just get up and wipe imaginary dust off of your jeans. 

“Can I help you?” you ask the stranger at the door. Standing in your doorway is a tan girl with hair that genuinely makes you want to weep, messy and brown and, worst of all, actually sort of attractive given the context, the context being the rest of this woman. In a University of Arizona TechPark t-shirt and shorts that look very comfortable, there is something about this woman that makes you feel the slightest bit on edge. 

“Hi!” She smiles at you. You should be disarmed, since it’s a smile, but it’s one of those smiles that is too big for its owner’s face, and you instead feel vaguely unsettled. “Does Sollux Captor live here?”

You hear Sollux say yes and ask who it is, but there’s something in his voice you can’t quite place. You stand in such a way that blocks your guest from seeing inside.

“Who’s askin’?” 

She laughs, a light, twinkly sound, and extends her hand. “Well, my name is Aradia Megido, and I’ve sort of been looking for him. May I come in?”

You know that if you let her in, the rest of your days will be lost ones. Sollux will be reunited with his wonderful special girlfriend and you’ll have to leave because she was here first, and why couldn’t she have fucking stayed dead? (She clearly never died.) Who the fuck had to go and exhume her when nobody asked for that, anyway? 

You should be happy that the dead girl isn’t dead, but come on.

“Sure, okay,” you say, “I guess.” 

Her megawatt smile makes you feel burnt out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the longest chapter; sorry for the obnoxious literary allusions, I'm dealing with obnoxious boys here. 
> 
> uvu*


	6. 1 Day

**1 Day**

You currently live with your boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend.

_Cue laugh track!_

It sounds like the set-up to a horrible sitcom; one that gets cancelled. In fact, it should have gotten cancelled a long time ago, and if your houseguest paid any attention to the classifieds you leave by her nest, maybe it would have been. (Aradia has set up shop on an air mattress in your living room. You have surrendered your living room for her. No one ever thanks you as much as they should.) She makes dolls out of the papers and names them after Egyptian gods.

She’s a strange one, Aradia.

Sollux never calls it strange - he calls it quirky, and eccentric, and unique. Frankly, you think “strange” is a concession, a compromise, even. What else do you call the girl who asks you your astrological sign every fucking morning at breakfast (there’s no way she’s dumb enough to forget Aquarius every goddamn day, even if you “totally seem like a Libra!”) and then cheerfully tells you that doom lies on the horizon? She says it while _smiling_. Doesn’t that strike anyone else as fucked up? 

No, they’re just happy she’s alive. Even after all this time. 

You get some peace and quiet later that day when Sollux leaves with her to go get groceries. They used to ask if you wanted to come; in fact, you used to want to come. Now they know better than to ask and you sit in the apartment brooding. Better than pushing the cart while they platonically hold hands and look at things with the excitement and wonder of eight-year olds. Eight-year olds who, apparently, have never seen a fucking carton of orange juice before. It’s like they woke up _stupid_. Though you can’t speak for Aradia. You can only speak for Sollux. 

You get some peace and quiet. 

**61 Days**

You spent her welcome home party like a reclusive bitch, because you suspected her of stealing away your boyfriend long before it actually happened. 

(It would be one thing - for the sake of the record - if she had literally stolen him. Usurped you as his lover and led him away by the dick. It would hurt like a bitch, but it would be _different_ and maybe even justify your rampant bitterness. But she did something much worse. She didn’t lead him by his dick, she led him by his heart. Anyway, this was quite a while before the effects of that thievery had really set in. Like animals who fear an oncoming storm, you were moody without apparent cause.)

In the time you’ve known him, you can count on both hands the number of times you’ve seen Karkat smile. And then all of that was blown to fuckall high heaven because once he heard the news - once everyone heard the news - he was not Karkat Vantas. He was Karkat “Holy Shit My Frown Muscles Have Atrophied” Vantas. 

While they sat planning the party, it was your job to escort Aradia somewhere else, so that the surprise wouldn’t be ruined. Nevermind that your _life_ was ruined; her surprise at a party that was about as predictable as a Insert Random Relevant Celebrity getting arrested couldn’t be ruined. Perish the thought. 

“So you left to - what was it? “Find yourself”?” you asked her as you sat in your favorite coffee shop. This was after she spent fifteen minutes chatting up the barista, who apparently also knew her. Whatever, it’s cool. 

“Something like that!” Everything this woman says ends in an exclamation point; God forbid she ever stop smiling or looking excited and happy to be alive. You’re not even that happy to be alive, for fuck’s sake, and you’re sure not longing for the sweet embrace of death or anything. It’s like she enjoys seeing you miserable. “It’s kind of complicated, but basically I had to get out of here. I felt trapped. Kind of like I was dead - I mean, I was living, but I felt like I was dead. And nothing anyone said or did could change that.” She looked at you and tilts her head. That’s an annoying habit of hers. “Do you ever feel like that?”

“All the time,” you assured her as you stared off into the distance.

The thing with you and Aradia is that you never look her in the eyes.

So eventually you got the text from Feferi - wait, shit, Feferi? really? - and it was your cue to take her back to the apartment. Your apartment.

That’s where you’re hosting the party. Your apartment.

When you confronted Sollux about it - since, you know, he’s not the only one who lives there! - he called you a selfish shit and told you to grow up. 

Neither of you said anything on the way back. 

They all said surprise and she acted like she was shocked; blah blah, same bullshit that happens at every fucking party as far as you’re concerned. There wasn’t any booze (Feferi, who you will later find out got immersed with the party planning given her charisma and talent for people, thought it was in bad taste) which left you pretty pissed, especially since you were sure you had some wine in there and did they really throw it out? _Really? ___

__You wanted to go to your room but lo and behold, th ere was a table in front of your door and on that table was a cake. One of those photo-cakes, the kind where culinary magicians somehow put a picture of someone’s grandchildren or the cast of Naruto onto a cake so that everyone can get a kick out of digging into little Hector’s eyeballs. It’s always struck you as sort of creepy, but when you actually looked at the cake it took you a few seconds to react. Delayed reaction._ _

__One._ _

__Two._ _

__And there, in RGB-icing format, was a picture of Aradia and Sollux._ _

__He was kissing her cheek._ _

__It’s an interesting gesture, that. You come from Italians; you knew better. You’ve kissed relatives on both cheeks and heard it referred to as _European_. You’ve kissed Feferi on the cheek before parting, Kanaya as a way of saying hello, and Karkat exactly once before you were told that it was way too close to his face, thanks ever so much. It’s actually pretty innocent as far as kisses go; he’s not kissing her hand like some chivalrous chump, or her forehead like he does to you when you don’t feel like getting out of bed, or God in Heaven forbid her lips. Just her cheek. _ _

__So in retrospect - you think of this now as you recall the event - what you did next was not only “self-indulgent”, “childish”, “destructive”, and “fucked up”. It was also wholly unnecessary._ _

__No one saw it for well into the party; they were too busy performing the social-equivalent of a rimjob to the guest of honor, kissing her ass like there was actual money to be made of it. When Kanaya said, “Let’s cut the cake,” there was no way she or anyone else could have known that an anonymous benefactor already did the honors. And, hell, maybe you were doing them a favor._ _

__Of course, they couldn’t really prove it was you, either. You never admitted to it. Everyone knows, but you never, ever told._ _

__They went like lemmings to the cake and you were reading a magazine, curled up in one of your easy chairs. You only looked up when you heard, in what is to this day probably the worst tone you’ve ever dared to think of, your name._ _

___”Eridan."_ _ _

__You wouldn’t have even looked up, but you always answer to Sollux because it’s been quite a few month’s and, well, let’s face it; you’re not Pavlov’s dog, you’re Pavlov’s _bitch_._ _

__You looked at your boyfriend with a glassed-over expression._ _

__“Guess someone already cut it,” you said, a trifle defensively, which you hadn’t meant to do. “Want me to finish the job?”_ _

__“Why, so you can massacre it more?”_ _

__“I got this, KK,” Sollux said. “Eridan, come with me to the hall.”_ _

__You weren’t going to let that happen. Instead, you stood up. Looked between the two of them and said, real excited-like:_ _

__“Hey, guys! I know y’all are real into video games, right? You should totally play this new one, it _just_ came out. It’s called, hop the fuck off my dick. Give it a play.” _ _

__You left your apartment and slammed the door so hard that it still doesn’t close right, still requires a little bit of effort to keep it from swinging back open after it’s been shut. You have to jiggle the knob the right way._ _

__(You did not massacre that cake, by the way. And it’s also not your fault that they decided to go for red velvet, nor is it your fault that by the time you knifed up Aradia’s half of the cake it might have looked like her face had gotten in a bad collision with every kind of car known to man. None of that is your fault. Although it doesn’t matter, because you didn’t do it.)_ _

__**1 Day** _ _

__You don’t really like to think about that; the repercussions from it weren’t exactly pretty, in that everyone basically would not talk to you for about a month and Sollux literally almost left you._ _

__Again, to recap: he almost left you over _cake_._ _

__Cake that he couldn’t even prove._ _

__He’s so moody sometimes._ _

__Anyway, it was a big bad thing and you don’t like to think about it, but you torture yourself with it anyway. You do it to regulate your behavior mostly; after all, you might want to stand up and slam your hands on the table and call her a raging harpy and throw dishes everywhere, but that would be -_ _

__Self-indulgent, childish, destructive, and fucked up, to name a few._ _

__Actually, Sollux didn’t even scream at you. After the party he sat you down (like a child) and told you that if you couldn’t be happy for him reuniting with his friend - yes, friend - then maybe you weren’t emotionally mature enough to handle being in a relationship. He could have yelled at you; that would have been one thing. Instead he kissed you (on the forehead) and left and then you proceeded to feel like absolute shit for the next week or so. You didn’t get out of bed. Either no one noticed or no one cared._ _

__You took some Elontril and you moved on._ _

__You’re adjusting, is the thing. So is she; that’s what they keep telling you. She went off to the Rockies and climbed mountains or smoked dope or whatever the fuck it is she did, she’s kind of vague about the whole thing and you’re not even sure anyone wants to know. And that’s apparently why she can’t get a job or her own place._ _

__Where are her parents?_ _

__You don’t even ask, lest you sound like a brat. That’s your biggest fear, is showing everyone what a vain little shit you really are. You made that mistake once. You will not make it again._ _

__You hear the door open and you try not to roll your eyes._ _

__You look at them even though you don’t want to; and here is why you don’t want to. Sollux looks a million times happier with her than he ever did with you. Even when you were together, he seemed kind of tormented. Both of you did. Broody, angsty shitheads who happened to like each other a little bit more than the rest of the world. You mocked things together. You bitched together. You smiled on rare occasions and you didn’t hold each other after sex because that would be just as saccharine as the things you both claimed to abhor._ _

__When he’s with her, he smiles - and maybe it’s the calming influence of a best friend, or maybe it’s not. Rationally speaking you know he still likes you. You still sleep in his bed or he still sleeps in yours - an empty gesture, because in the grand scheme of things it’s just you taking your glasses off and pulling up the covers on one side while he does the same on the other. He wakes you up frequently in the middle of the night when he goes to check on her. You don’t tell him he wakes you up; you used to, but you’ve sort of gotten the impression that he doesn’t care._ _

__If you are going to be realistic, you know you’re probably blowing things out of proportion. Probably imagining things. Your psychiatrist - you had one as a teenager - told you that while your “vivid imagination” was definitely a blessing, you also had a tendency of making yourself the tortured protagonist of a story that has no reliable narrator._ _

__Well, you are the narrator. And if you aren’t reliable, tough shit; you’re all you have, after all._ _

__And right now the pages are telling you you’re fucked._ _

__(Or maybe that was just the day’s prediction for Aquarius. Hard to say.)_ _

__You know things are at least a little bit normal, don’t you? He doesn’t turn you down for sex that often, although he never initiates it, either, and it’s always quick and with his hands and sometimes he covers your mouth with the hand he’s not using because - “nothing personal, ED, but you can get kind of noisy and I don’t want you to feel embarrassed.”_ _

__(That’s not what you hear. You hear something else. Something to the effect of him not wanting to be embarrassed by what an attention whore you are when you’re getting any action. He doesn’t say that, but that’s what you hear._ _

__And also, you HATE it when he calls you that in bed. It sounds rushed, like he’s trying to skip ahead to the end of the book without reading any of the dialogue.)_ _

__You still cook, sometimes. Sometimes she cooks. She’s apparently a quarter Greek, which means fuckall to you, other than occasionally you’ll find your kitchen annexed by a messy haired, T-Shirt clad girl who tells you that her bukkakke-baklava or spank me-spanakopita or whatever the flying hell she’s conjuring up this evening is - wait for it - “to die for”._ _

__Well, of course it is._ _

__“Welcome home,” you tell them, and Aradia tells you thanks and that you really ought to be sitting down (you are already sitting down) because she’s got great news._ _

__“I’m cooking. Don’t even tell me otherwise. You work too much, anyway - that’s why you’re so angsty,” she says, saying ‘angsty’ like she’s teasing. Sollux snickers._ _

__“I’m not angsty,” you inform her. “And I don’t mind cooking. Really. I kind of like it.”_ _

__“Then why do you bitch so much when you have to cook?”_ _

__Aradia interrupts you from responding to him. “I’m cooking up some saganaki tonight; you’ll love it.” She grins at you. “You’re Italian, you have to love it. It’s got cheese.”_ _

__You don’t have to do anything, and you don’t appreciate being given orders, but you nod anyway, like that’s really the end of it._ _

__“Hey, ED,” says Sollux, who has not called you any of his old petnames since Aradia’s triumphant return, “do you have plans tonight?”_ _

__You look at him with a rather shocked expression._ _

__“No,” you tell him. “I’m yours. Why?”_ _

__Fuck, that sounds desperate._ _

__Fuck._ _

__His face kind of falters and you want to crawl under a rock and die. “Well...I mean, it’s definitely been a while since we’ve done something...just-us.” He looks over at Aradia. “I was just going to ask if you were going to be here tonight, or if you were going to be hanging with FF or KN or something.”_ _

__He overdoes the nicknaming shtick when he’s off his game._ _

__“I was plannin’ on being here, yeah,” you tell him. You raise your eyebrows. Frown a little. “Is that a problem?”_ _

__“Well, I was going to have KK over, and-”_ _

__“Message received.”_ _

__When you storm off to your room, you are careful to close the door instead of slamming it, because if there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s a door that can’t close. Your room is your last safe place, after all._ _

__Why does he want you gone so bad? What the hell does it matter? You lament to yourself as you pop in your earbuds, open up Google Drive and start typing meaningless, worthless trash. You’ve given up on drowning; you’re thinking of driving or maybe crashing but it’s not like you care, you just want to know why your boyfriend wants you out of the apartment._ _

__You’re friends with Karkat, for the record. He was your friend first._ _

__Wasn’t he?_ _

__Yes, of course he was._ _

__In fact, prior to the Advent of Aradia, the three of you used to hang out and get pizza and play video games on a regular basis. It was your thing. Maybe you’ve been kind of reclusive lately, a trifle whiny, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to be invited when your fuckin’ friends want to fuckin’ hang out._ _

__You’ve missed those days, after all._ _

__Lost days._ _

__More likely than not, it’s because they’re tired of you. (What else could it be? This isn’t like some TV show where it turns out there’s a dorky, romantic reason Sollux needs you to leave. Maybe he’s going to plot with Aradia and Karkat on how to get back in your good graces! Maybe they’ll throw YOU a surprise party! Hilarity ensues! Life isn’t that sitcom. That’s not how things really work.) You don’t exactly blame them. Sometimes you tire of you._ _

__You tire of yourself fairly often, but that’s not something you share with people and it’s also beside the point._ _

__You’re typing crap at your computer - something about your new character, a lonely pianist who’s probably a repressed homosexual or something, that always goes over well - and you don’t get anywhere with it, even, just kill him off because his naivety annoys you. He goes out with a bang. You’re thoroughly done with it._ _

__You want to sleep, but you’re not sure you’re tired enough to even try._ _

__You decide to see if you can get some alone time with Sollux - not for that, but for the purpose of maybe apologizing or at least trying to talk about something so you know that you can still talk to him in private. It’s better than agonizing, anyway. You’re getting older, after all. You know better._ _

__And it’s funny - not in retrospect, but just in general. It’s laughable. (Laugh track-able.) While you are sure that you do not live in TV Land, where dads are all incompetent and teenagers are wacky and capricious - while you are positive that when you woke up this morning, a theme song didn’t start heralding your presence, what happens next is, in fact, just like a sitcom._ _

__Ain’t life strange._ _

__You hear your name coming from Sollux’s room, and incidentally the door is shut. You have one of two options: listen or leave. Get involved or get out._ _

__(For some reason you think “advance or abscond,” but that doesn’t quite fit, because you’re sure that if you choose to eavesdrop on your boyfriend, what you will be doing is the opposite of “advancing”. You can think of this, but not the right word. Typical.)_ _

__You don’t make a choice; you stand there, paralyzed, and your lack of decision forces you into one whether you like it or not._ _

__“He’s just been so difficult lately,” Sollux says. He’s not trying to lower his voice any; he must have known you would have your earbuds in. Though they are not connected to anything right now, you take one out anyway. “I don’t know what to do.”_ _

__“Maybe he’s lonely,” says Aradia. “He probably thinks I’m taking away all of your attention.” She says it with a light laugh and that light laugh makes your stomach drop._ _

__“He wouldn’t be dumb enough to think that,” Sollux says. “Look, I’m sorry for bitching about this. It’s pretty stupid.”_ _

__“Plus, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about Eridan when Karkat comes over, remember?”_ _

__“Yeah. Exactly.” You hear the springs of his bed give way, a light surrender to his weight. They don’t groan the way your mattress does. Yours is an antique, and also a rusted-through piece of shit. “I love you, AA.”_ _

__“I know.”_ _

__Okay._ _

__Here is the thing._ _

__You are not consciously aware of the fact that you’ve had such a hang-up over those words. It hasn’t occurred to you. You express your affection in other ways, the two of you; you’ve never had a need for “I love you”. People who have some kind of obsession with it have always kind of made you laugh._ _

__But you’re exactly the same, of course._ _

__It shouldn’t be so hard. People say it in passing. People sing it in songs._ _

__But you cannot say “I love you”._ _

__So you never have. You’ve almost-done it once or twice. Sometimes during sex and sometimes before and sometimes after. Sometimes on the telephone and sometimes when you’re just getting home. Incredibly, you’ve always been able to swallow it, always alble to push it away and you aren’t even sure why you’ve done it. It’s not like you have an issue with it. Love. You love him. He loves you._ _

__Don’t you?_ _

__Doesn’t he?_ _

__You’re not sure._ _

__The idea that you really are the tortured protagonist of a story that has no reliable narrator strikes you as shocking. But the writing is on the wall. You’re difficult. You’re lonely. And Sollux wants you out of the house so that he and Aradia and Karkat can all laugh at you and talk about you like you’re desperate, lonely trash._ _

__And also, he loves her._ _

__He said it to her, after all._ _

__In all the time you’ve been dating (you don’t count the days) he has never told you he loves you. Not even in passing. Not even in a song._ _

__What does that mean? Well, you aren’t sure. After all, you’ve never said it to him, either._ _

__You think about picking a fight - storming in there and screaming at him. Because maybe you are difficult and lonely, but whose fucking fault is that? You’re not just some guy he has to deal with, you are his boyfriend, you should matter to him, you should be someone he cares about and tries to mollify or even fucking notice every once in a while. Would that really be asking too much? You could go in there and raise your voice, tell him you hate him because sometimes you do, tell him you’re jealous because sometimes you are, tell him you wish that his zombie girlfriend hadn’t come back from the goddamn grave. These last few months, you’ve been waltzing with ghosts, him with his and you with the ghost of the boy you’ve fallen so horribly in love with. It slays you. It makes you ache. You hate loving him. You wish you could rip out your heart and throw it in his face, although if you did you’re sure he wouldn’t take it._ _

__You want to say all this._ _

__You don’t._ _

__Instead, you grab the keys to his ‘96 Jeep Cherokee from off the kitchen table where he always leaves them and you slip them into your pocket. You’ve got your phone if he should get worried, although you really sort of doubt it - after all, didn’t he want you gone? Well, there you go. Problem solved. He wants you gone? Oh, you’ll give him gone. You’ll show him. You’ll show everyone._ _

__You don’t really think that maybe you should stay, maybe it’s your fault - well, you DO, but then you decide it’s bullshit. You also don’t think that you should force him to spend time with you, kiss him like it’s the last time you will, because if you did then it would be just that, forced. The idea leaves a bitter taste in your mouth._ _

__You certainly don’t think that it’ll be the last time you see him, because even you aren’t that paranoid._ _

__When you leave, you are careful to close the door instead of slamming it._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up cutting a chapter, so chasing is going to end up at a grand total of eight chapters instead of the planned nine. I promise it'll be okay; can't you taste the denouement? 
> 
> It'll be okay.
> 
> And if you think everyone seems an awful lot like they're out to get Eridan, re-read the dialogue and remember who's telling you your story. After all, the flip side to having a tortured protagonist telling your story is that there might be a little bit of unreliability here and there. I think we're all guilty of that, though, in the end.


	7. Dayless

**Dayless**

Your storming out is nothing unusual. In fact, Sollux probably isn’t worried.

As it should be, really.

A part of you feels like you’re tempting fate by leaving him alone; what if the roof caves in or what if there’s a fire, or what if some crazy awful serial killer comes in to lay down some crazy awful slicing and dicing? What if the mob comes for Aradia?

Oh. Wait. 

Aradia.

Yeah, he’ll be fine.

You don’t live in an overly mountainous area; you never have, actually, though you’ve always been fond of mountains and you’re not sure why. One time your father dragged you and Cronus to Wyoming for a Business Thing, some ubiquitous trip that was in the middle of July, and so he decided it’d be easier to take you two under the guise of a vacation in lieu of hiring someone to babysit the two of you - and, plus, if you must be fair, you were thirteen and Cronus was sixteen and both of you sort of fancied yourself rebellious, too cool for a nanny, so in the end you guess it was probably a good call on your father’s behalf.

Wyoming wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination exciting. You flew into the Denver airport and had to transfer from there, and on the first flight you were seated next to a really hot chick who spent the whole flight with one of those eye-mask things, so you got to stare at her a little and sketch her in your composition book because that was a thing you did, something you still occasionally do when you’re on public transit and have the time - anyway, yeah, that was the first flight and it was fine and fucking dandy, but then on the transfer flight you were stuck next to Cronus, who was possibly more annoying en transit than he could have ever been on solid ground, drinking awful complimentary coffee and eating those barely salted peanuts they give you, the kind you can’t have because you are mildly allergic, and shouldn’t he not be eating those anyway, on account of how if one touches you you’ll feel mildly sick to your stomach and sometimes break out in zits? 

(You get kind of scatter-brained when you think about your childhood.)

Anyway, the flight was downright wretched, so you already left the plane in a piss poor mood. You didn’t have high hopes for Wyoming and to this day you feel like those less-than-great expectations are pretty fucking valid. Why your father, an attorney for a massively powerful firm located in Seattle, had any reason to traverse to buttfuck nowhere Wyoming eludes you to this day.

But he did. 

In all honesty, you’re not sure why you remember the trip so clearly. As a familial unit you’ve been to places far more interesting - New York City, for one, Venice Beach and even actual Venice, in fucking Italy - but the summer before your freshman year was, inexplicably, the summer you remembered most candidly. 

Actually, though, it is pretty explicable. 

You remember the mountains.

Your father drove you one day through Yellowstone while he screamed in Italian at someone on the phone; Cronus was fortunate enough to fall asleep, while you sat staring at a bunch of bullshit animals you had exactly zero interest in. Growing up in the nineties, you didn’t have a smart phone, but if you had, you’re pretty sure the reception would have been fuckall, which you say to console yourself as you look back and remember how bored you were at the time. Angry bored. 

(You only packed one book, an encyclopedia on historical figures. To this day you’ve read it four times. It’s a big encyclopedia. You hadn’t packed more seeing as how you’d been told this was a vacation.)

It was pretty useless, overall. Eventually you got out of the care to take a picture of Old Yeller or Old Reliable or some old geyser thing, doing its geyser thing, and then when Dad had someone take a picture Cronus got Dad pissed because he posed in such a way to paint a picture of Old Fuckall coming from his dick. 

So you went home. The ride to your hotel was just as awful.

Except it _wasn’t_ , because on the way home you noticed the mountains. While Dad and Cronus bitched at each other, slipping in and out of English like a fish in an oily patch of water, you looked at the mountains. Though it was the middle of July, they were snow covered and fantastic. Tall and breathtaking and it wasn’t just the altitude. You soon tuned out their arguments and stared at them, just outside your rental-car’s window. You aren’t even a nature person, you couldn’t give less of a shit about nature if you tried, but there was something about the white-topped mountains that transfixed you, as well as leaving you a terrible shade of inspired. (And like any know-it-all thirteen year old with a class of Art I under his belt, you were constantly chasing after your concept of “muse”.) It is the only part of Wyoming you care to remember.

Florida didn’t have mountains and neither, really, does here. It’s not that Massachusetts doesn’t have mountains, and God knows it has more of them than Florida, but you don’t like driving all that much and most of its mountain ranges are out of range, at least by your standards. And so the closest thing you’ve found isn’t even really a mountain range, it’s more like a road that travels up a hill and ends at a promontory, overlooking Mass Bay. 

(It’s all very pretty, even if it’s not exactly a mountain.)

Atop the promontory is some kind of isolationist nature walk thing, although you’ve never once made it up to the top before. Supposedly it’s like Sea World for plants without any of the shows and rollercoasters, some kind of obscure kitschy touristy trap, and based off the onslaught of traffic you’ve seen coming from there around rush hour, you wouldn’t dare challenge that fact. 

You tend to visit at night and your favorite thing to do is park your car at a couple of really-old meters, the kind that sometimes spit your money back out at you or demand a few cents extra, because it’s a lot more secluded than the parking lot at the top of the hill - that parking lot is affectionately known by locals as Vandal’s Retreat because any car that gets parked there is destined to get more key than a swingers’ party in the seventies. You’d rather have wild animals peck out your eyeballs than let your precious baby Camaro lay exposed to these kinds of people, so you park her at the meters. It’s not perfect, but it works. 

Wait, what’s this? Oh, look at that. You’re in someone else’s car, and you absolutely don’t give a shit about what happens to it? 

Well, shit, son! Looks like you’re driving up the goddamn psuedo-mountain! 

You have never driven up the trail before; you CAN, but you haven’t. You usually walk, which is why you’ve never made it to the top before, you usually get tired after a few miles or so. Who knows, maybe you’ll make it to PlantLand or whatever the hell it’s called? Maybe you’ll find a new boyfriend there. One who’s into plants and likes nature a lot and oh wait, he’d expect you to like nature too and probably wear those ugly khaki ranger shorts. Those aren’t very sexy.

You sigh to yourself under your breath. 

As it so happens, 4:00 is this area’s rush hour - every fucking minivan, apparently, has the same brilliant idea to try and beat rush hour at the same goddamn time. This leaves you a little happy with the horn (you’re in a bigger car, you have _muscle_ ) and in fact you sit waving them all through half-sarcastic, waiting for the onslaught of mom cars to make it down the hill.

It’s 4:45 by the time you’re done.

Fucking _hell._

It’s a bit darker now, which is nice. You’re pretty proper pissed by this point, and left in the isolation of Sollux’s Jeep, you are forced to agonize over your actions. 

You hate that you do this. You hate how you storm out. (You used to always rationalize it by saying that if you were the one to leave, you’d at least know that you’d come back. Not to him, though. Just to yourself.) It’s a really bad habit, something you’ve kept up for too damn long, and you’re thinking about apologizing. You have been kind of a massive shit lately. It’s not like he’s tonguing her or touching her butt or doing Couple Things with Aradia - he’s kind of like her how you are with Fef, you tell yourself. Even you and Fef dated for a while.

(Eighth grade. You were twelve years old. You thought you were going to get married. She broke it off because you got clingy and for a while you stopped being the world’s Best Awesome Friends. Then you reunited in the middle of freshman year.) 

Not really the same thing, though. They’ve probably kissed. They’ve probably _done it._

Oh, ewwwwww. No. No, no, no. Unacceptable.

You scowl to yourself. 

(They probably have, though.) 

All the same, you’ve been probably awful to people who don’t deserve it, and if you hadn’t been, maybe now him and Kar and Ara (you mean Aradia) wouldn’t be having a gossip session about you right now. It does make you feel pretty shitty; Kar was your friend first, after all, or at the very least at around the same time. What the fuck happened?

Aradia happened, but it’s not fair to keep placing the blame on her. 

To keep doing any of this isn’t fair. 

You grumble to yourself and sigh and fidget and reach into your pocket to pull out your cell phone, left hand while your weak hand keeps the wheel. You’re not sure if it’s worth it to call him; you really want to keep being bellicose in the safety of his car. It’s oddly self-indulgent and a lot more fun than feeling guilty. Yeah, whose fault is it? Sollux’s. Aradia’s. Karkat’s. Anyone’s, really. Anyone who never treated you like the special fucking starfish you are (is that the phrase? you can’t remember) is at fault. You could go missing. They don’t know. What if someone kills you when you get up to the top? Maybe that’s a thing. Then they’d be sorry. Oh, they’d be real sorry. 

You don’t feel that much better. Kind of like a little bitch, but that’s it.

You hit your speed-dial-three for Sollux. (He bitched for forever and a half because he hates the number three, but one is voicemail and two is Feferi, that’s just the way it has to be. It’s the natural order.) Rather predictably, you think, it goes to voicemail. You click your tongue to the roof of your mouth, shouldering your phone so that your hands are free to clasp the wheel. 

“Yeah, Sol, ‘s me,” you say, squinting your eyes as you traverse the corkscrew road. “Look, I- I’m sorry for bein’ kinda... uh, difficult, lately. Can we talk when I get home?” You’re thinking about turning around, but that’d be kind of hard, since this road isn’t huge and you never know when a random surprise minivan could pop out of nowhere. “Miss you,” you tell him, because you do.

Your chest hurts.

“I really am sorry,” you say, and you really are, you didn’t even realize it until you said it but you really are. Your tongue protrudes a little when you aren’t expressly speaking. It’s not all that hard - just driving up, just driving left, that’s really your only option, but you’ve never been a good driver - and you have to struggle for your words. His voicemail client, after all, is timed.

“Hey, Sol?” You ask it like he’ll answer. “Uh, I know I haven’t... haven’t really shown it lately, or like, ever.” 

What makes you think this is a good idea to do on the phone?

“I just wanted you to know somethin’...haven’t really said, but it’s kinda important, I guess.” 

You’re an idiot. Get off the fucking phone. 

“I just wanted you to know that you’re really great, even when you’re a little fuckin’ shit, you’re really great and I just-” 

It is a fact that fear slows down a person’s reaction time. As does being tired, and as does being upset.

“I lov-”

Faced with the tealish mommavan monstrosity attempting to share your roadspace, you do the only thing you can. Out of fear of being hit head on, your hands twist the wheel and you swerve. 

You swerve right. 

You have no way of knowing whether or not the voicemail service cuts you off or if you do that yourself, if Sollux ever hears your “shitgottago” murmured under your breath, or how much of your “I love you” actually got out. 

You have know way of knowing anything, but fear slows your reaction time to a crawl.

The funny thing is that, barrelling towards Massachusetts Bay, you do not scream. You don’t really think to.

You’re too busy thinking of everything else. 

**4,146 Days**

“I love you!” 

Feferi looks at you really funny, twisting her beautiful fluffy black hair back into a scrunchie, sliding her fuschia colored specs up her nose. 

“As a friend, right?”

Your smile falters.

“As a boyfriend?” 

She frowns.

“That’s what I was afraid of.” 

**1,576 Days**

“I love you.” 

Cronus looks at you kind of funny, but he’s in a cap and gown and so everything he does looks real scholarly and educated, even though you’re convinced he’s none of those things. He kind of hesitates before he says it back-

“Ti voglio tanto bene,” 

which is Italian for, mostly, the same thing, except it’s for family members because in Italian they make that distinction.

**1,034 Days**

CA: i lovve you man  
CA: *love  
CG: Holy shit you need to go to sleep.  
CA: im serious  
CG: It’s three in the fucking morning, you tool.  
CA: but im serious  
CA: say it back  
CG: Fine, you asshole, let’s just pretend this isn’t totally homoerotic. Love you too, fuckface.  
CA: thanks  
CA: i just kinda needed that okay

**648 Days**

“Kan, I love you.”

“I know you do.”

It’s your first January that you aren’t at home. Kanaya’s gotten you dressed like you’re a fucking king and Feferi’s scored you a date.

Frankly, you love everyone.

**501 Days**

“I hate you.”

“You barely even know me, you gaudy, dramatic trash. I don’t want to live with you either, but I need a place and you need a place and that’s just how it’s gonna have to be.” 

You are staring at possibly the most infuriating person you have ever met. You want to throw plates at him. You want to scream at him. 

“If you leave your goddamn boxers on the living room floor again, I will slit your throat.”

“Good, put me out of my misery.”

You think, for the first time, you might be evenly matched. It’s a feeling you find exhilarating, although you aren’t at all sure why. 

**394 Days**

“I want you.”

“Don’t you always?” 

**319 Days**

“I like you.”

You’re sitting on the couch. It feels shocking to say, a real revelation. You’re surprised you said it. Sollux looks at you more than a little oddly.

“Oh, take me now, ED.”

“Nevermind, you used the nickname, I take it back.”

“You can’t take it back. You like me. That shit’s permanent. Didn't you go to grade school?”

**300 Days**

“I adore you.” 

“I’m still coming with you to Best Buy.”

“Oh for _fuck’s sake_ ,” you tell him. “For the last fuckin’ time, I’m not gonna get _ripped off_ , it’s not like this is some seedy movie where I’m a chick walkin’ into an auto-garage. Holy shit, it’s a laptop computer, I think I will be okay.” 

“Nope,” he tells you cheerfully. “You need me.” 

“I never said that.”

**109 Days**

“I need you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It’s not the first time you’ve fucked on the floor in lieu of a bed or a couch or, basically, anywhere other than the floor. Before you met Sollux you could never wrap your mind around the idea. Why would anyone do it on a floor unless that was literally their only option.

But the way your shoulder blades press into the hardwood floor and the way you have to get close, the way kisses taste sweeter when you’re both pissed off - you really couldn’t imagine it any other way, not now and probably not ever.

**45 Days**

“Ti amo.”

“I’m gonna look that up, just wait.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

If he does, he never says anything.

**1 Day**

“I love you.”

You do get the whole thing out, you do utter the full phrase, you do say it all and by some divine fucking providence, it doesn’t get cut off. 

You don’t know this, of course.

You find yourself missing Sollux in a crazy stupid way, a reckless sort of regretful, and you wish he were there to touch you or hold you and you wish you could hold him, and you remember New Year’s, fucking New Year’s where you didn’t hold him quite long enough. That was pretty stupid.

The last thing you see is gorgeous cobalt water, a striking blue you’ve never seen before in your life.

You wonder if there exists some kind of mathematical equation for paralysis, some kind of stretched-out not movingness or suspension or anything, anything that could keep you from falling.

In the very, very end, you have a stress-induced aneurysm seconds before you hit the water.

Basically it all boils down to this: when you die, you don’t want to feel a thing.

And in a split-second of cosmic justice, you don’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is one more chapter left. It's still a thing that's happening, don't fret. This wouldn't be much of a resolution, would it?


	8. Chapter 8

**11,755 Days**

For the first time in quite a long time, you are entirely alone.

KK just left, and when KN made a surprise visit, Aradia decided to go back to her apartment for cocktails or some shit. You were only half listening, really, by that point. 

God, you stress too much over him.

Every time - every fucking time - you get in a fight, he deigns it necessary to storm out like a petulant little shit. It’d be too easy, you guess, to just stick around and maybe talk things through. Then again, that isn’t really your style, talking things through. In fact, it’s really more of his thing. He’s a big fan of saying things you’d rather leave unsaid. 

You feel a little bit better, though, about this tricky business of dating him. Karkat is really fucking good at that kind of thing; in fact, you might even say that wading through the murky waters of an unstable relationship is his favorite thing to do. At the very least, he’s good at it.

(Eridan, of course, is different. He doesn’t wade, he soaks.) 

You often find yourself alone in these aftermaths, the quiet, angry places that remain after one of your myriad fights. It helps if you can get into Karkat - he tends to put things into perspective. Really, you could see how it might be bad, banishing Eridan from the apartment, but - 

Oh, wait, that’s why he’d left. He wasn’t even being petulant, this time.

Sometimes you can be really fucking stupid.

Anyway, you could definitely see how Eridan might be the slightest, tiniest bit justified in being pissy regarding his expulsion from the apartment, but you couldn’t talk about your horrible relationship problems with him sitting right there. It would be tacky. And you could have just as easily sent Aradia out, too. Made it less suspicious. Except that, looking back, you realize you can’t really be in any volatile situation without her presence. She has a mollifying presence on you that feels almost vital, like without Aradia you’d be a danger to yourself and others. The best of best friends, even though she’s a little different than you remember after her more-than-a-little-ridiculous new age self-discovery horseshit holiday. 

Six years. Six years to find yourself.

You could do a lot in six years.

You could die in six years, even. 

Aradia’s not dead, though, you remind yourself. It still strikes you as shocking, every time you think of it. You’ve thought of her as dead for so long, how could she possibly be anything else? It’s as if the state of one’s mortality, to you, at least, is completely static. If one of your friends were to die, you’d probably have a hard time remembering.

(You don’t like to think about that, though.)

She’s alive and you’re alive, you’re all fucking alive, isn’t that sufficient? You roll your eyes, mostly at yourself since no one else is there. Conferences with KK have such an influence on you, you realize. It’s like he stirs up all the feelings you’d saved away for later and you’re stuck with the aftermath of dealing with every single one, simultaneously.

(Where are your pills?)

You look up at the door every time someone passes in the hallway, every time you hear it shake. Partly because you think Eridan may have gone out to drink, which is no good, considering he took your fucking car. If he so much as scratches it, you think, you’re going to kill him with your bare hands.

(You’d never kill him.)

In fact, you sort of adore him. Treasure him. Cherish him. All of that tacky bullshit you’d prefer stay behind the scenes of Lifetime movies. You’re not very good at telling that story, at conveying that particular set of feelings. It’s something to work on, once he gets back. That’s more or less what KK told you, and damn him, damn him for being right. He also told you that Eridan requires attention, kinda drinks it like nectar, and sees a refusal to give it as some kind of horrid transgression. It’s not exactly that you ignore him, really. You don’t. It’s just that you value your alone time and he sees that as some kind of affront, like it’s a slap in the face that you don’t want to spend every second with him, like every breath of air you take that he hasn’t breathed first makes him die inside, or something. 

(He’s so morbid. Always flirting with death, taunting you with it. It’s really stupid. He drops it into conversation like you’re too stupid to notice. One time you told him that you suspected he’d fuck the Grim Reaper, if given the chance. He turned it back on you, saying that at least Death was probably incapable of falling asleep after, which was one time, one _fucking_ time you didn’t Make Love, which is secretly what he’s all about. God forbid you have sex, heaven forbid you fuck - he won’t admit it, but he never fucks, he makes sweet, sweeeeeeeet love, pressed against his dumb satin sheets and constantly in the throes of some kind of everlasting passion, real or imagined. He sickens you, a little; too bad you like him a lot.) 

While lounging on the couch, you decide to check your phone, which has been on silent for the past few hours or so. You’re mainly checking because you’ve lost track of the time, and also - let’s be real - because Eridan always, without fail, calls you when you get in fights. It’s his failsafe, and if you didn’t enjoy listening to his stupid dorky messages on your answering machine, you might be more inclined to answer your calls.

(You are so bad at letting him know you care. Because you do. Maybe not as much as he does, but you do care, ultimately.) 

Sure enough, one missed call. That’s funny. Usually it’s at least two; one time after a particularly nasty fight it was a whopping eleven missed calls; you almost laughed at that, because fucking _Christ_ , that’s a lot even for him. Tonight, it’s just one. Seems fitting.

Before you give his message a listen, you try calling him back. It goes straight to his answering machine, that pre-planned recording of himself telling you his name and number, both of which you already know by virtue of the fact that you are calling him. (“Hi,” he tells you, a little too cheerily, “you’ve reached the voice mailbox of Eridan Ampora,” and he tells you his number. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number after the tone, I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can. Thanks, and have a good day.” You remember him recording it, actually. You were on this couch, this purgatorial sofa, and he was pacing as he tried to make it sound perfect. His dumb Florida accent still shines through; he even stutters a little at “voice”, he’s always had trouble with his vees. He’d given up in frustration. You roll your eyes at the memory.) You leave a message of your own:

“Hey, jackass. It’s Sollux. Come home.” 

Brevity is wit.

And you’re a little embarrassed (rightfully so) at how idiotic you feel when you check your phone. You get so giddy about it - do you really even care that much? Probably not. You’re not sure how to explain it; not that you’ve ever had to, but still. He sounds the most like himself in those voicemail messages. Not presentational or dignified or composed in the slightest, just kind of natural. Kind of like the way he talks after sex or when he’s talking serious. Low and a little self-doubtful. It’s very endearing. 

“To listen to your messages, press one,” says the automated voice from your cell phone provider. You press one. “You have one new message.”

Yes, you’re aware.

“Yeah, Sol, ‘s me,” he says, as if it could feasibly be anyone else speaking with his voice calling from his fucking phone. “Look, I- I’m sorry for bein’ kinda... uh, difficult, lately. Can we talk when I get home?”

His apologies are really captivating. If only he’d ever say them to your face. 

“Miss you,” he says. 

Your chest hurts. 

You miss him too. It hits you like a slap in the face and you can’t even believe you’re shocked. 

“I really am sorry.”

“I know,” you say back to the recording.

“Hey, Sol?” he asks. He asks it like you’ll answer, which you do, since you’re alone and it’s kind of a reflex. You’ve already started having a conversation with the phone. Might as well carry it through. He’ll make fun of you for it when you tell him. If you tell him. You might keep it your little sentimental, sappy secret.

“Uh, I know I haven’t... haven’t really shown it lately, or like, ever.” Your ears perk up. You adjust your position on the couch; you’d been leaning kind of languidly, but now your posture straightens and you’re sitting upright. 

“I just wanted you to know somethin’...haven’t really said, but it’s kinda important, I guess.”

It is a fact that fear slows down a person’s reaction time. As does being tired, and as does being upset. Fortunately, you’re in the safety of your own home, and so your vague feelings of fear, fatigue, and frustration don’t factor into anything tragic. It just makes you hold the phone a little bit tighter.

“Can’t this wait?” you ask him. 

“I love you,” he says back, like he’s trying desperately to win an argument of some kind, like that’s his trump card, like that’s his royal fucking flush. 

Maybe it is; you blink a little faster to the point that you notice you’re doing it, and you think about replaying the message again, and you do. You think you can hear traffic in the background, but you aren’t really sure, and it sounds more like white noise than anything else. You hear him say “sh-”, the precursor to a profanity, but that’s it before it cuts off. 

“To delete this message, press seven,” says your answering machine robot. You stare at the phone again.

He loves you?

“To save it in the archive, press nine.”

He loves you.

“Messages saved in the archive will be kept there for ten days.” 

You think, reasonably, that you should panic. That feels like a right reaction. He’s always been needy and emotional, sure, and you figured you’d be the one to leave him, you were sure he’d say it first, anyway. You certainly weren’t going to. You’d thought it several times, sure, but up until now you had used Eridan as your litmus test. If the needy bastard has held out, so can you. 

Only, now he’s said it. 

You grin like a fool at your phone and you go ahead and press seven, you’d rather hear him say it in person, anyway. You think about calling him back and decide against it. He’ll come back; shit, he loves you. He loves you. He lovvvvvvvvvvves you.

It’s like you’re on the playground only better. If he had any pigtails, you’d pull them every day. You’d throw paper balls at him. You’d call him names to make his face heat up. 

He loves you. 

He said it first, and he loves you, and that, really, is it. That’s all there is to be said. You put your phone away, no need for it now. Since you’re alone, you can afford to be an emotionally affected son of a bitch. The kind of person you’ve always hated; the kind you’ve pointedly mocked in front of Eridan so he knows better, knows not to ever act that way around you.

You kind of feel guilty. 

You wonder if you should write up a fucking apology letter for when his royal highness returns.

But you don’t. 

Instead, you go to his room - fuck, the way you’re accosted with his presence even though he’s not there is remarkable. You open the door - _Eridan._ It reeks of sandalwood and sorrow, of cologne and carelessness, of paint and pain. 

Eridan.

It also smells vaguely of the sea, which is something you’ve noticed about him; he hates the beach, he’s told you, but there’s something unmistakeably nautical about him, like someone took Mass Bay - the nearest body of water - and weaved it into his DNA. You’ve told him so, on one of your fantastically rare poetic moments. He’d told you in response that if anything, his heart belonged to the Atlantic. 

Fucking Floridian. 

He’s comically maritime, and his room reflects it; his room exudes his essence whether he’s crafted it to do so or not. You find being here oddly comforting. You close the door and sit on his bed.

He’s gonna be pissed when he finds you - he hates when you touch his things, although not nearly as much as you hate when he touches yours - but fine, let him be pissed. “Don’t you remember?” you’ll ask him. “You lovvvvvvvve me.” He’ll get that properly pissy look of his and say “ _shut the fuck up, Sollux,”_ , because he only calls you by your full first name when you’ve gotten in his bad graces. 

You resist the urge to fall asleep there - that would be too cheesy, too Lifetime movie for your tastes. Instead, you lean against the headboard and allow yourself the luxury of contemplation, for once focused on something other than your own shortcomings. 

Eridan - your stupid, hopeless, needy, crazy all-too significant other - loves you. He loves you, and you love him. The strange thing about it is that you don’t feel panicked or stressed or anything, just mindlessly at ease. He loves you and you love him and you’re actually sated. It doesn’t feel like he’s chasing quite so much anymore; maybe, instead, he’s caught you, or you’ve caught him. So be it. 

For once, you think, you are actually perfectly calm.

For once, you are happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL THIS HAS BEEN A FUN JOURNEY, HASN'T IT?
> 
> So this is my first completed - and longest by far! - Homestuck fanfiction. I have to say, I'm pretty proud, overall. It was a lot of fun to write, all things considered, and I'm really glad I put the time in to polish it and make it all pretty and fun. 
> 
> I have to give SERIOUS THANKS to some people - to Rihannon, for listening to me whine and putting up with my sad feelings, as well as Andy, for basically being another incarnation of me, from a world where I picked Sollux to latch onto instead of Eridan. I have to thank Emi, too, for listening to me ramble, And Nessa - thanks for letting me talk about my """internet fame""" without getting annoyed or anything; you have the patience of a saint, and you know I'd be lost without your constant inspiration. 
> 
> It'd be rude to list my influential authors (I get influence everywhere, anyway) but to those of you who have written before me and been my fellow soldiers in the war of MCD and other sad Erisol, I salute you. I hope with continued practice I may someday reach your level, all of you, so thank you. 
> 
> Gosh, I'm getting emotional.
> 
> Friendly note: I realize the ending is kind of polarizing. That was planned all along! *evil laughter*  
> If you'd like to talk to me about it, I will do so ceaselessly at my tumblr, mourningpluto.tumblr.com. However, I entreat you to message me there, rather than analysing my various literary choices here. Thank you so much.
> 
> Thank all of you so much, for reading and for everything else.
> 
> With all my love,  
> Kate


	9. The Lost Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So you knew you were going to break up, but for sweet fuck’s sake, you never thought it’d be like that. Never like that.

**11,380 Days**

T-Mobile’s website, as far as you’re concerned, is a blistering, rotten piece of shit. 

Actually the layout isn’t as bad as it could be, you don’t think - it was pretty easy to navigate because here you are looking at a page called “Saved Voicemail Messages” which only took about two minutes to get to - home, support, plans and services, documents. And here you are. 

But it’s told you nothing useful, so again - blistering, rotten piece of shit.

After all, you already _know_ that messages saved in the archive are saved for ten days, and you’re already _aware_ that you can only save fifteen messages at a time, which is a joke because you can’t even think of fifteen people who would come to your birthday party if you deigned to throw one, so why would they bother calling you? Anyway, the graph on the page you’re currently perusing tells you about upgrades you can make if you feel like paying more (a whole fourteen days to save messages!), but it doesn’t tell you what you need to know, which probably means you’ll have to navigate tech support again. Like you ever call tech support. This is one of those rare times where you actually have no idea what the fuck you’re doing. 

Those rare times have been popping up more and more frequently lately, but whatever. You don’t really notice them all that much - just blips on your radar, and then they’re gone. 

But you do a little poking around on the website anyway just to see if you can put that off - the whole talking to another human being thing. You were never really good at that anyway; never one of your strong suits. For some time you got kind of better about it. Instead of just Karkat you started being able to talk freely with his friend Kanaya, and this girl Feferi who moved to town, and even some other mutual friends here and there. Though you weren’t a social butterfly by any means, it became easier - and, also, you did sort of have someone pestering you about not seeming like a “fuckin’ social pariah” all of the “goddamn time”. Yeah, you used to talk to people a lot more, for a while there.

Then there was an accident and you don’t do that anymore.

So you don’t really want to call tech support and listen to what you know will be an entry-level scab taking up the job to supplement college or a family, someone hired to read through a script, someone with about as much knowledge about T-Mobile’s inner workings as _you_ , for fuck’s sake. You don’t want to, but you will if you have to. Which you kind of do.

You already tried talking to Karkat, but he uses Verizon, and you asked Feferi but she uses AT&T, and their reactions to you telling them the reasoning behind your call were only different in energy; Karkat went through the whole spiel of telling you what a creepy weirdo you are, how you can’t really afford to be paying two phone bills, how the life insurance-slash-lawsuit money is going to dry up, how you should start eating regularly and being less of a depressing shut-in, which didn’t really bother you until he starting citing numbers at you, and yeah you know it was a year ago but you just forgot to cancel the fucking phone number, okay? 

You were quick to hang up on him and call Feferi, who was never your friend in the first place but sort of ended up that way when everything was - 

This is stupid. 

When he died.

When Eridan died Feferi became your new best friend in the most fucked up of ways, and although you could spin some bullshit tale about how tragedy brings people together or whatever, the truth is that the two of you were the only ones who had the goddamn courtesy to be pissed at him. Karkat, even, couldn’t summon up the anger; he cried at the wake and skipped the funeral. Aradia was more silent than you’ve ever seen her through the whole thing and had a speech written that she delivered in a monotone, not looking up from her index cards. 

(Of course, everyone had a hard time with the procession because he specifically put in his will that it had to be outside, and of fucking course the bastard had to have rain for the celebration of his death, the overly melancholic son of a bitch.)

At the time you were too shell shocked to be angry, but when you thought about it later, the drama and romance and irony of it all probably would have made him deliriously happy, and you sort of loathe that you’re capable of thinking such terrible things about somebody who’s dead but to be fair he kind of had it coming.

So Aradia read her lifeless speech for the lifeless guy and then you had to go up and say some things to an audience probably only blaming you, with his horrified family taking up all four of the front rows. You never knew there were so many of them - he talked about his brother and his father, who looked too much like him for your personal comfort, and he talked about his grandmother, who didn’t cry at all. He didn’t mention the onslaught of aunts and uncles and cousins. He didn’t mention his father’s brother who had his jawline, nor his aunt who dropped her g’s in the same way he did, nor his six year old cousin who had his cobalt-cerulean eyes. That pisses you off too sometimes. You weren’t nearly prepared enough.

The long and short of it is that after the funeral you and Feferi were the only ones who could bother being angry, and between Karkat and Kanaya and Aradia with their wayward pity for him, you really had no other choice. 

One night the two of you talked about what a fucking idiot he was, about how he was reckless and selfish and a bit of a tool. (A bit of a tool? That’s how she said it. More like, the biggest fucking tool in the box. Hungry for attention at all hours. Needy for acknowledgment. Desperate - just desperate, really, desperate in general. This is particularly evident seeing as how he went after you.) You talked about how he probably did it on purpose even though you argued the opposite in court until you were blue in the face. You talked about all kinds of things until you exhausted each other. 

This is why the two of you still speak. If she wasn’t so understanding of your potent rage towards him, you wouldn’t bother. Her Florida accent would be too much to bear. 

Despite everything, she responded just like Karkat, only with a softer tone of voice. She was shocked, really, and instead of accusing she just asked questions. Why wouldn’t you cancel Eridan’s phone number? Why would you put yourself in that kind of position? And you didn’t tell her what you could only tell Aradia, just for the sake of preserving your dignity - that you kept it because sometimes it’s two AM and you have no hope of sleeping, so you press six on your speed-dial and listen to him tell you, in the quiet darkness of your room -

“Hi, you’ve reached the voice mailbox of Eridan Ampora. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number after the tone, I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can. Thanks, and have a good day.”

You actually have it memorized, like the whole thing isn’t sad enough. 

In point of fact you didn’t think you’d miss him so much, or at all, when you two inevitably broke up. You weren’t that good together. The sex - which you try your damndest not to think about and still do when you really want to torment yourself - was pretty incredible, and you had chemistry, but in terms of temperament you couldn’t have been more poorly matched. It’s like you were better at fighting than you were getting along. Hell, you liked fighting more. You both did. 

So you knew you were going to break up, but for sweet fuck’s sake, you never thought it’d be like that. Never like that. 

You can expect to break up with someone - and there was no doubt in your mind you’d be the one to dump him - but no matter how okay you are with that prospect, no matter how inevitable you tell yourself it is, you don’t expect them to fucking die. How rude is that? Eridan had a tendency of harping on you about manners, telling you not to look like “such a fuckin’ slob” when you had company, or even when you didn’t. Yet after a fight - an inconsequential one at that - he had the audacity to go throw a temper tantrum on a cliff or a hill or a precipice or wherever the fuck he got himself killed. 

Eridan was all storm and anger and look where it got him. He was a reckless, stupid son of a bitch, you often think to yourself. 

And there are times when you can’t bolster up the anger no matter how vivid it was just days prior, because sometimes all you really have it in you to do is...well, nothing. You do a whole lot of nothing. Since it’s not technically possible to just sit in a chair and decompose, ‘nothing’ includes a lot of sleeping and some occasional news-website scrolling, wherein you let the warmth of your laptop burn the tops of your thighs as you lean back in bed (your bed, which he always called his, but now it’s got a different set of pillows and sheets so that makes it yours) and scroll through several articles without reading them at all. Mostly you sleep. 

Closer to the accident you got away with this a lot more. At some point, though, people starting losing compassion for you. You ended up quitting your job as a scab at GameStop and now you’re living off money you never, ever should have acquired. On these days you are not so much living as you are existing. 

But it isn’t always like that and as such today you actually intend to do something productive. It’s not something you’re looking forward to, or even something you know you’ll go through all the way, but it is a something nonetheless.

Aradia was the one who brought it up in the first place. She has her own apartment now, all the way by the Orange Leaf yogurt place, but you make a point of trying to at least make some kind of contact with her every day because you know she worries. She mentioned that she’d meant to call an employer and had accidentally hit E-for-Eridan instead of E-for-Eric, taking him to his voicemail which for all intents and purposes should not still exist. That’s how you got caught, anyway, and so throughout all this she’s been your primary support. 

Only support, really. 

Some more inspection, via Google and some other techie sites you used to frequent, tells you that you can cancel a phone subscription over the phone. Isn’t that funny? It seems like it wouldn’t work, but of course you’re cancelling his cell phone contract, not your own. (In point of fact, you don’t even use T-Mobile.) You just aren’t entirely sure if you should do it or not.

With hands that tremble more than you’re really comfortable with, you take out your own cell phone and hit the 6 key for what you presume will be the last time. 

You wonder how you could have ever fallen in love with that voice. Talk about ridiculous. He sounds so bolstering, so full of himself - and fuck, the way he says he’ll get back to you as soon as he can? What a stupid fucker Eridan Ampora is. _Hey jackass, I called you about a year ago, you still haven’t gotten back to me. What’s the matter, is the reception spotty in whatever corner of Hell you’ve taken control of?_

He also tells you to have a good day, and this time you actually laugh out loud. 

And your laughter subsides. 

You’re not sure if everyone is else is over it, or if you’re over it, or if you ever will be over it. You’re accosted by a slurry of terrible, conflicting feelings every time you think of him, and a lot of times you forget that he’s died; you just expect him to walk in the door reeking of his signature cologne stench and pull you into one of his too-tight hugs any day now.

Naturally you think it’s nothing short of pathetic that you’d let him come back if that were really it - if he’d just left you to worry and grieve for nothing after all of this time. But you would. Of course you would. 

You miss specific things about him more than you miss him as a whole, which strikes you as odd plenty of times, but then again couldn’t possibly make more sense. As a person, he was moody, and clingy, and surly, and needy; but you can long to see those striking cobalt-blue eyes that always seem to catch you off guard without making a statement about the times he’s rolled them up to the ceiling as an act of theatrics. You can miss his smile without thinking of how many times you being proved wrong was the reason. You can miss his clipped progressive verbs and slight Southern slurring without missing the way he’d use his melodious voice to tear you to shreds.

And sometimes you miss all of that, too. All of it. 

It’s this whole thought process which leads you to dial up the customer service number on T-Mobile’s front page, which leads you through what you count as three phone trees and even that low number is probably because the poor headset workers had gotten tired of hearing some guy from Boston scream at them about some dead guy wanting his phone bills to stop coming. Something like that, yeah. You aren’t so good with words.

You are connected in exactly forty-five minutes on the dot, though you don’t notice this at first. The process is relatively painless, like necessary surgery; you explain your situation as ‘delicate’ when it isn’t, and the mention of death is a handy little tool that makes people move along the way you want them to. It’s emotional manipulation, which is a tactic you learned from the very best. 

Normally you have to sign something, leave the house and put on regular clothes and probably shower, but they don’t make you. His cell phone bill was set up to be paid automatically through one of the credit cards he happened to leave to you, something vaguely smothering for a boyfriend and nothing more, but an act of good providence for you all the same.

So it’s pretty easy. The woman on the other end says that you won’t be receiving any more bills. _Thanks,_ you tell her. Thanks very much. 

You don’t quite feel better - better is kind of pushing it - but you do text Aradia and tell her what you did. A few minutes later you’re rewarded with six emojis, three of which are inappropriate, and one of her weird emoticons with zeroes for eyes. If you didn’t know her so well you’d be inclined to take offense - you cut off one of the last ties to your dead significant other, and she sends you smilies?  
But you do know her so well and she knows you so well, and essentially what this boils down to is that you are no longer going to let yourself use the crutch of his voice in the middle of the night; no longer will you let yourself be sad or angry or anything at him when maybe it isn’t even his fault; no longer are you going to think to yourself that you did something awful. 

After setting down your phone you let yourself dwell, perhaps too nostalgically for your own good, about some of the things he did that were not objectively awful. He had a wicked sense of humor not unlike your own, and he kissed your temples to scare away fading migraines, and he translated even the most banal of words on the Italian menu when you ate out (“-yeah, _pesci _is fish, it means fish, it means you’re gettin’ fish,”). He gestured too much with his hands when going on rants, and they were almost always funny because he’d get completely reckless and slam his hands on the nearest hard surface, mostly for effect. He sang to you softly, under his breath when neither of you asked for it, really, and he was a hauntingly quiet tenor who trained you to want to hear his voice at three in the morning because somehow your bouts of insomnia coincided perfectly with his.__

__He wasn’t perfect - you don’t think you have to worry about idealizing him, after all of this. But you choose, here and now, to let go of your anger, and to refrain from dwelling on storm and anger any longer._ _

__It’s coping._ _

__You press the 6 again, out of habit and curiosity, and are only a little shocked to hear -_ _

__"We're sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again."_ _

__But you don’t need to try your call again. No._ _

__Never again._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welllllllll, here's the epilogue that I'm sure at least three people were waiting for!!
> 
> I worked on this for quite some time and debated on whether or not to publish it, but I cleaned it up some and here it is for your perusal.


End file.
